LONDON: The eyes are pools of innocence set in the waif-like features, and for 15 days they have peered out at Britons from television screens and newspaper front pages, T-shirts, posters and computer screens, with a simple message: Find me.

The message has been repeated across the land - on television and in cyberspace. Sports stars like the soccer heroes David Beckham and Cristiano Ronaldo have joined politicians, including the prime minister-designate of Britain, Gordon Brown, in seeking her safe return.

The outpouring has been likened, with some hyperbole, to the national grief that erupted over the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. But, as in Diana's tragedy, there has been no magic spell to bring her back.

In early May in the Algarve region of Portugal, Madeleine McCann, on the cusp of her 4th birthday, disappeared from the bedroom of her family's vacation apartment where she was sleeping, along with her younger twin siblings, while her parents ate supper in a tapas bar 100 meters away.

Her fate has absorbed Britons, touching their sense of pity and outrage in a way unseen since the murders of two 10-year-old girls, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, in the village of Soham in 2002.<NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT> language=JavaScript type=text/javascript> if ((!document.images && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Mozilla/2.') >= 0)|| navigator.userAgent.indexOf("WebTV") >= 0){ document.write(''); } </SCRIPT> <NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT>

"In an echo of the emotional spasm that seized the country almost a decade ago following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the McCanns' missing 4-year-old, Madeleine, is no longer just their child," the columnist David Hughes wrote in The Daily Telegraph on Friday. "She has become ours."

Yellow bands have been worn on the arms of the English cricket team and of legislators in the houses of Parliament. A video of the missing girl, with her distinctive right eye, was played to 50,000 soccer fans during a match between Spanish soccer teams in Glasgow on Wednesday, and fans have worn shirts bearing her portrait.

Rewards totaling millions of dollars have been offered by people including J.K. Rowling, the billionaire author of the Harry Potter series, and the airline tycoon Richard Branson. A Web site set up by the family (www.findmadeleine.com) has reportedly received millions of hits.

The scale of the campaign has grown so much that the girl's parents have hired financial advisers and lawyers to help them campaign for their daughter's return from Praia da Luz, the seaside town of palms and bougainvillea where their nightmare began two weeks ago.

In Praia da Luz on Friday, journalists from Britain, Brazil, Spain and the United States kept vigil in the shade outside the whitewashed complex of vacation apartments from which McCann disappeared. Police tape fluttered across the steps leading up to the apartment, barred at the top by a child-proof gate - a reminder of the child-safe resort that this town was meant to be.

"It's shocking that this could happen in Luz," said John Daffey, warden of the seaside church where the McCanns have gone daily to pray. "This is one of those safe holiday places. It's a wake-up call, not just for Luz, but for Portugal, for Europe."

In Britain, the sense of a nation owning the grief of individuals has also stirred debate about Britain's recourse to cloying sentimentalism in the face of loss that has melted the characteristic stiff upper lip.

"The McCann family is showing the quiet dignity and strength that is so singularly absent from much of the national outpouring of sympathy," Hughes wrote. "This is their heartache and no one else's. Doesn't our insistence on trying to share it vicariously simply exploit their awful plight?"

The outpouring has overwhelmed the initial questions about whether the girls' parents - Kate and Gerry McCann, both medical doctors - behaved irresponsibly by leaving three children sleeping alone when they went out for dinner May 3. "All parents - except the most neurotic - leave their children at times," the columnist Simon Hoggart wrote in their defense in The Guardian.

But despite the high-profile campaign, the police have identified only one formal suspect, a 33-year-old Briton named Robert Murat, who has lived for the past two years in the resort town with his mother, just 100 meters from the apartment from which McCann vanished.

Murat, who played a key role aiding police with translation in the first few days of the hunt, was drawn to the attention of authorities by a British newspaper reporter, who thought he was acting suspiciously. He has denied any involvement and has not been arrested.

In the absence of answers, residents and vacationers said they were going about their business and trying to stay hopeful.