from the car and scaled the intervening gate
with monkey-like agility.

He met the child's wild rush with one arm extended; the other--Muriel
frowned sharply, peering with eyes half closed, then uttered a queer
choked sound that had the semblance of a laugh--in place of the other
arm there was an empty sleeve.

Through the rush of the wind she heard his voice.

"Hullo, kiddie, hullo! Hope I don't intrude. I've come over on purpose
to pay my respects."

Olga's answer did not reach her. She was hanging round her hero's
neck, and her head was down upon Nick's shoulder. It seemed to Muriel
that she was crying, but if so, she received scant sympathy from the
object of her solicitude. His cracked, gay laugh rang out across the
field.

"What? Why, yesterday, to be sure. Spent the night in town. No, I know
I didn't. Never meant to. Wanted to steal a march on you all. Why not?
I say, is that--Muriel?"

For the first time he seemed to perceive her, and instantly with a
dexterous movement he had disengaged himself from Olga's clinging arms
and was briskly approaching her. Two of the doctor's boys sprang to
greet him, but he waved them airily aside.

"All right, you chaps, in a minute! Where's Dr. Jim? Go and tell him
I'm here."

And then in a couple of seconds more they were face to face.

Muriel stared at him speechlessly. She felt cold from head to foot.
She had known that he was coming. She had been steeling herself for
weeks to meet him in an armour of conventional reserve. But all her
efforts had come to this. Swift, swift as the wind over wheat, his
coming swept across her new-born confidence. It wavered and bent its
head.

"Does your Excellency deign to remember the least and humblest of her
servants?" queried Nick, with a deep salaam.

The laugh in his tone brought her sharply back to the demand of
circumstance. Before the watching crowd of children, she forced her
white lips to smile in answer, and in a moment she had recovered her
self-possession. She remembered with a quick sense of relief that this
man's power over her belonged to the past alone--to the tale that was
told.

The hand she held out to him was almost steady. "Yes, I remember you,
Nick," she said, with chilly courtesy. "I am sorry you have been ill.
Are you better?"

He made a queer grimace at her words, and for the second that her hand
lay in his, she knew that he looked at her closely, piercingly.

"Thanks--awfully," he said. "As you