The physician drew Muriel down beside him upon a couch and asked her to tell all that had happened. He had never known about the address in the little iron box, for although he had been a close friend of Ezra Bassett’s in their boyhood, the physician had been away much of the time in later years.
“Dear,” he said comfortingly, “do not be fearful. The little that I have heard of your artist father leads me to believe that, although evidently poor, he was possessed of high ideals and was very talented. I cannot believe that he has purposely neglected you all of these years. Now dry your tears and go back to your friends with a happy heart and be sure that the tender love you have given your father is now to be returned to you.”
When the girl had left him, the physician bent his head on his hands. And so he was to lose Muriel. One by one those who were dear to him had left him and in his old age he was to be alone, for it would be presumptuous on his part to ask so lovely a woman as Miss Gordon to share the little he had to offer. But at that moment he recalled the tears in the grey eyes and the break in the voice that had said, “I, too, have been lonely.”
Rising, he thought, “I will go to Helen and ask her if she cares to share my home.”
CHAPTER XLI.
MURIEL HEARS FROM HER FATHER.
Once again it was spring. The trees about High Cliffs Seminary were pale green and pink with unfolding fresh young leaves and in the orchard back of the school the cherry, peach and apple trees were huge bouquets of fragrant bloom, spreading a feast for the bees that hummed cheerily among the flowers. Now and then a meadow lark sent its shaft of song rejoicing through the sunlit morning from somewhere beyond the tennis courts where three girls were playing, with but little animation, however, as the first real spring weather was too warm to be invigorating.
“I wish we knew what has happened to sadden our Rilla,” Catherine Lambert said when, the set having been finished, the girls sat on a bench to rest.
“She came back to school after the Christmas holidays so joyous that I thought some wonderful thing had happened like a romance or——”
“A romance and Muriel not yet eighteen years of age!” This protestingly from Faith. But Catherine, heeding not the interruption, continued: “But that could not have been it, for now she seems very sad. I should think that you two girls who are so intimate with her might ask what has happened. Surely she is troubled about something.”
“I wish I could truly say that I have noticed no change in Muriel,” Joy remarked, as she looked meditatively toward the orchard; “but I cannot, for she is changed. She studies harder than ever before, if that can possibly be. Miss Gordon told me that she had never known a pupil at High Cliffs to make such progress.”