Daphne Dean

Copyright

© 2015 by Grace Livingston Hill

eBook Editions:

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted for commercial purposes, except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without written permission of the publisher.

All scripture quotations are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual people, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

Published by Barbour Books, an imprint of Barbour Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 719, Uhrichsville, Ohio 44683, www.barbourbooks.com

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Chapter 1

The sky was very blue, yet there were tiny dabs of cotton clouds lingering in the distance for a glorious sunset, which they understood was being staged that evening. The sun was golden and gracious, sifting down like fine powdered metal dust over the late afternoon, and glorifying even the grimy old sweatshirts of the ball players as they hurtled over the wide diamond, or poised with hands on bent knees, and intent gaze on the pitcher.

High up on the grandstand, a village-made affair of weather-beaten boards, Keith Morrell sat outlined against the golden-blue of the sky. He was not especially interested in the ball game, but the grandstand offered the only attractive resting place while he waited for the five o'clock train, which was supposed to bring a local real estate agent who had charge of the old Morrell homestead. He had written the agent, William Knox, that he would be at his office that afternoon to consult with him about the sale or rental of the place, but Knox, with the easygoing ways of the suburban agent, had gone to the nearby city to meet another man, and left word he would be back at five o'clock. Keith Morrell was thoroughly disgusted with him, and almost thought to go away without seeing him, only that he knew he would have to return another day, inevitably, and who knew but Knox would have another call to the city when he came the next time? So he strolled about the familiar streets a few minutes until he discovered the ball game going on at the old stand where he had often played himself in days gone by. He climbed to the top row and sat there looking about him, trying to bring back the picture of other days, trying to bridge the five years that had passed since he had been in town last.

A great many things had happened since then. The family had closed the house during his second year in college and gone to Europe, and he had spent his summers there with them, his briefer vacations with classmates at their homes. Then at the close of his college course he had met his parents in England and they had toured the Orient together for several months. It was while he was taking a special course in architecture in England that his father had died, and a year later his mother. All the ties of his boyhood home wiped out! And now he was back in his native land and his native town!

He hadn't wanted to come here. His mother's death was too recent and he dreaded old familiar scenes. His grief was too new to bear going back to where his life had been so closely associated with hers. But the agent had insisted that he come and understand thoroughly the terms on which the prospective buyer would take the house, and finally he had come, running down from New York on the noon train, hoping to get the matter finished and get the four o'clock train back. This delay was most annoying.

He looked around at the people who were beginning to swarm up the little grandstand. It would soon be filled to capacity, for Rosedale was only a suburb, and this ballpark was just a village enterprise, a sort of community affair.

He looked down among the players, and marveled that they all seemed so young to him, none over sixteen or seventeen. They seemed so much more immature than high school students had when he was one of them. And yet, he had been only seventeen himself when he graduated from high school. Had he looked as youthful as some of those kids down there tearing around that diamond as if the fate of the universe depended upon winning that game?

Suddenly it came to him that he was thinking in terms of a very old man who was soured on life, and here he was barely twenty-three. Probably to some other eyes he looked even now as immature as those youngsters down there did to him.

And just then one of the fellows, tall, well built, with springy brown hair that waved crisply, walked over from the bench below the grandstand to a girl sitting at the extreme end of the stand, in the third row up, and handed her a watch and a wallet. He was a nice-looking chap with big brown eyes and well-chiseled features. And he didn't look so immature after all, now when he raised his eyes and smiled. He was probably only about seventeen at the most, but already there was a set about his well-molded chin and his pleasant lips that showed determination and purpose.

Keith noticed the girl now for the first time. She must just have taken her seat, for the place had been vacant a moment before, he was quite sure. She was a pretty girl. She had ripply brown hair like the boy's, yet where the sunlight touched it, it gleamed almost golden.

Then she lifted her eyes and turned about, looking up behind where Morrell sat, in answer to a motion of the boy. They were both looking up and waving to someone at the farther end of the seat, an older man with iron-gray hair and a plain business suit who smiled and waved back to them.