The story of Cecilia Grace sparentage was a curious one. Maurice Grace, a plodding, serious young doctor, with no pretension to good looks except his deep and quiet eyes, born of little more than peasant stock, had found himself at the age of twenty-eight or thereabouts doing locum tenens for Dr. Brady, of Knocklynn. Knocklynn is situated in a great wild country. The villages are small and scattered, the farmers poor and struggling. There is no middle-class there, unless the village shopkeepers count for such. There could be no lonelier spot for a young man cast away there as was Maurice Grace. Hardly any society came his way. The priest, a traveling schoolinspector or official of the Department of Agriculture or the Post Office: these made about the only society available.
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