"God take care of the pair of you—and be good to the rest of us," whispered George, wringing her hands hard and dropping them.

That was how he went away.

A few weeks later he was lying, a mangled object, in a field in Flanders. One of thousands—living, laughing, good as honest bread is good; the possible passer-on of life and force and new thinking for new generations—one of hundreds of thousands—one of millions before the end came—nice, healthy, normal-minded George, son and heir of a house of decent nobles.



CHAPTER V

And still youth marched away, and England seemed to swarm with soldiers and, at times, to hear and see nothing but marching music and marching feet, though life went on in houses, shops, warehouses and offices, and new and immense activities evolved as events demanded them. Many of the new activities were preparations for the comfort and care of soldiers who were going away, and for those who would come back and would need more care than the others. Women were doing astonishing work and revealing astonishing power and determination. The sexes mingled with a businesslike informality unknown in times of peace. Lovely girls went in and out of their homes, and from one quarter of London to another without question. They walked with a brisk step and wore the steady expression of creatures with work in view. Slim young war-widows were to be seen in black dresses and veiled small hats with bits of white crape inside their brims. Sometimes their little faces were awful to behold, but sometimes they wore a strained look of exaltation.

The Dowager Duchess of Darte was often absent from Eaton Square. She was understood to be proving herself much stronger than her friends had supposed her to be. She proved it by doing an extraordinary amount of work. She did it in her house in Eaton Square—in other people's houses, in her various estates in the country, where she prepared her villagers and tenants for a future in which every farm house and cottage must be as ready for practical service as her own castle or manor house. Darte Norham was no longer a luxurious place of residence but a potential hospital for wounded soldiers; so was Barons Court and the beautiful old Dower House at Malworth.

Sometimes Robin was with her, but oftener she remained at Eaton Square and wrote letters and saw busy people and carried out lists of orders.

It was not every day or evening that she could easily find time to go out alone and make her way to the Square Gardens and in fact it was not often to the Gardens she went. There were so many dear places where trees grew and made quiet retreats—all the parks and heaths and green suburbs—and everywhere pairs walked or sat and talked, and were frankly so wholly absorbed in the throb of their own existences that they had no interest in, or curiosity concerning, any other human beings.

"Ought I to ask you to come and meet me—as if you were a little housemaid meeting her life-guardsman?" Donal had said feverishly the second time they met.

A sweet flush ran up to the roots of her hair and even showed itself on the bit of round throat where her dress was open.

"Yes, you ought," she answered. "There are no little housemaids and life-guardsmen now. It seems as if there were only—people."

The very sound of her voice thrilled him—everything about her thrilled him—the very stuff her plain frock was made of, the small hat she wore, her way of moving or quiet sitting down near him, but most of all the lift of her eyes to his—because there was no change in it and the eyes expressed what they had expressed when they had first looked at him. It was a thing which moved him to-day exactly as it had moved him when he was too young to explain its meaning and appeal. It was the lovely faith and yearning acceptance of him as a being whose perfection could not be questioned. There was in it no conscious beguiling flattery or appraisement—it was pure acceptance and sweet waiting for what he had to give. He sometimes found himself trembling with his sense of its simple unearthliness.

Few indeed were the people who at this time were wholly normal. The whole world seemed a great musical instrument, overstrung and giving out previously unknown harmonies and inharmonies. Amid the thunders of great crashing discords the individual note was almost unheard—but the individual note continued its vibrations.

The tone which expressed Donal Muir—in common with many others of his age and sex—was a novel and abnormal one. His being no longer sang the healthy human song of mere joy in life and living. A knowledge of cruelty and brutal force, of helplessness and despair, grew in him day by day. Causes for gay good cheer and laughter were swept away, leaving in their places black facts and needs to gaze at with hard eyes.

"Do you see how everything has stopped—how nothing can go on?" he said to Robin on their second meeting in the Gardens. "The things we used to fill our time and amuse ourselves with—dancing and tennis and polo and theatres and parties—how jolly and all right they were in their day, but how futile they seem just now. How could one even stand talk of them! There is only one thing."

The blue of his eyes grew dark.

"It is as if a gigantic wall were piling itself up between us and Life," he went on. "That is how I see it—a wall piling itself higher every hour. It's built of dead things and maimed and tortured ones. It's building itself of things you can't speak of. It stands between all the world and living—mere living. We can't go on till we've stormed it and beaten it down—or added our bodies to it. If it isn't beaten down it will rise to heaven itself and shut it out—and that will be the end of the world." He shook his head in sudden defiant bitterness. "If it can't be beaten down, better the world should come to an end."

Robin put out her hand and caught his sleeve.

"It will be beaten down," she cried. "You—you—and others like you—"

"It will be," he said. "And it's because, when men read the day's news, almost every single one of them feels something leaping up in him that seems strong enough to batter it to earth single-handed."

But he gently put out his own hand and took in it the slim gloved one and looked down at it, as if it were something quite apart and wonderful—rather as if hands were rare and he had not often seen one before.

There was much sound of heavy traffic on the streets. The lumbering of army motor trucks and vans, the hurry of ever-passing feet and vehicles, changed the familiar old-time London roar, which had been as that of low and distant thunder, into the louder rumbling of a storm which had drawn nearer and was spending its fury within the city's streets themselves. Just at this moment there arose the sound of some gigantic loaded thing, passing with unearthly noises, and high above it pierced the shrilling of fifes.

Robin glanced about the empty garden.

"The noise seems to shut us in. How deserted the Gardens look. I feel as if we were in another world. We are shut in—and shut out," she whispered.

He whispered also. He still looked down at the slim gloved hand as if it had some important connection with the moment.

"We have so few minutes together," he said. "And I have thought of so many things I must say to you. I cannot stop thinking about you. I think of you even when I am obliged to think of something else at the same time. I am in a sort of tumult every moment I am away from you." He stopped suddenly and looked up. "I am speaking as if I had been with you a score of times. I haven't, you know. I have only seen you once since the dance. But it is as if we had met every day—and it's true—I am in a sort of tumult. I think thousands of new things and I feel as if I must tell you of them all."

"I—think too," said Robin. Oh! the dark dew of her imploring eyes! Oh! the beat of the little pulse he could actually see in her soft bare throat. He did not even ask himself what the eyes implored for. They had always looked like that—as if they were asking to be allowed to be happy and to love all kind things on earth.

"One of the new things I cannot help thinking about—it's a queer thing and I must tell you about it. It's not like me and yet it's the strongest feeling I ever had. Since the War has changed everything and everybody, all one's feelings have grown stronger. I never was furious before—and I've been furious. I've felt savage. I've raged. And the thing I'm thinking of is like a kind of obsession. It's this—" he caught her hands again and held her face to face with him. "I—I want to have you to myself," he exclaimed.

She did not try to move. She only gazed at him.

"Nobody else has me—at all," she answered. "No one wants me."

The colour ran up under his fine skin.

"What I mean is a little different. Perhaps you mayn't understand it. I want this—our being together in this way—our understanding and talking—to be something that belongs to us and to no one else. It's too sudden and wonderful for any one but ourselves to understand. Nobody else could understand it. Perhaps we don't ourselves—quite! But I know what it does to me. I can't bear the thought of other people spoiling the beauty of it by talking it over and looking on." He actually got up and began to walk about. "Oh, I ought to have something of my own—before it's all over—I ought! I want this miracle of a thing—for my own."

He stopped and stood before her.

"My mother is the most beloved creature in the world. I have always told her everything. She has always cared. I don't know why I have not told her about—this—but I haven't and I don't want to—now. That is part of the strange thing. I do not want to tell her—even the belovedest woman that ever lived. I want it for myself. Will you let me have it—will you help me to keep it?"

"Like a secret?" said Robin in her soft note.

"No, not a secret. A sort of sacred, heavenly unbelievable thing we own together."

"I understand," was Robin's answer. "It does not seem strange to me. I have thought something like that too—almost exactly like."

It did not once occur to them to express, even to themselves, in any common mental form the fact that they were "in love" with each other. The tide which swept them with it had risen ages before and bore them on its swelling waves as though they were leaves.

"No one but ourselves will know that we meet," she went on further. "I may come and go as I like in these hurried busy hours. Even Lady Kathryn is as free as if she were a shop girl. It is as you said before—there is no time to be curious and ask questions. And even Dowie has been obliged to go to her cousin's widow whose husband has just been killed."

Shaken, thrilled, exalted, Donal sat down again and talked to her. Together they made their plans for meeting, as they had done when Andrews had slackened her guard. There was no guard to keep watch on them now. And the tide rose hour by hour.



CHAPTER VI

Aunts and cousins and more or less able relatives were largely drawn on in these days of stress and need, and Dowie was an efficient person. The cousin whose husband had been killed in Belgium, leaving a young widow and two children scarcely younger and more helpless than herself, had no relation nearer than Dowie, and had sent forth to the good woman a frantic wail for help in her desolation. The two children were, of course, on the point of being added to by an almost immediately impending third, and the mother, being penniless and prostrated, had remembered the comfortable creature with her solid bank account of savings and her good sense and good manners and knowledge of a world larger than the one into which she had been born.

"You're settled here, my lamb," Dowie had said to Robin. "It's more like your own home than the other place was. You're well and safe and busy. I must go to poor Henrietta in Manchester. That's my bit of work, it seems, and thank God I'm able to do it. She was a fine girl in a fine shop, poor Henrietta, and she's not got any backbone and her children are delicate—and another coming. Well, well! I do thank God that you don't need your old Dowie as you did at first."

Thus she went away and in her own pleasant rooms in the big house, now so full of new activities, Robin was as unwatched as if she had been a young gull flying in and out of its nest in a tall cliff rising out of the beating sea.

Her early fever of anxiety never to lose sight of the fact that she was a paid servitor had been gradually assuaged by the delicate adroitness of the Duchess and by the aid of soothing time. While no duty or service was forgotten or neglected, she realised that life was passed in an agreeable freedom which was a happy thing. Certain hours and days were absolutely her own to do what she chose with. She had never asked for such privileges, but the Duchess with an almost imperceptible adjustment had arranged that they should be hers. Sometimes she had taken Dowie away on little holidays to the sea side, often she spent hours in picture galleries or great libraries or museums. In attendance on the Duchess she had learned to know all the wonders and picturesqueness of her London and its environments, and often with Dowie as her companion she wandered about curious and delightful places and, pleased as a child, looked in at her kind at work or play.

While nations shuddered and gasped, cannon belched forth, thunder and flaming, battleships crashed together and sudden death was almost as unintermitting as the ticking of the clock, among the thousands of pairing souls and bodies drawn together in a new world where for the time being all sound was stilled but the throb of pulsing hearts, there moved with the spellbound throng one boy and girl whose dream of being was a thing of entrancement.

Every few days they met in some wonderfully chosen and always quiet spot. Donal knew and loved the half unknown remote corners of the older London too. There were dim gardens behind old law courts, bits of mellow old enclosures and squares seemingly forgotten by the world, there were the immensities of the great parks where embowered paths and corners were at certain hours as unexplored as the wilderness. When the Duchess was away or a day of holiday came, there were, more than once, a few hours on the river where, with boat drawn up under enshrouding trees, green light and lapping water, sunshine and silence, rare swans sailing serenely near as if to guard them made the background to the thrill of heavenly young wonder and joy.

It was always the same. Each pair of eyes found in the beauty of the other the same wonder and, through that which the being of each expressed, each was shaken by the same inward thrill. Sometimes they simply sat and gazed at each other like happy amazed children scarcely able to translate their own delight. Their very aloofness from the world—its unawareness of their story's existence made for the perfection of all they felt.

"It could not be like this if any one but ourselves even knew," Donal said. "It is as if we had been changed into spirits and human beings could not see us."

There was seldom much leisure in their meetings. Sometimes they had only a few minutes in which to exchange a word or so, to cling to each other's hands. But even in these brief meetings the words that were said were food for new life and dreams when they were apart. And the tide rose.

But it did not overflow until one early morning when they met in a gorse-filled hollow at Hampstead, each looking at the other pale and stricken. In Robin's wide eyes was helpless horror and Donal knew too well what she was going to say.

"Lord Halwyn is killed!" she gasped out. "And four of his friends! We all danced the tango together—and that new kicking step!" She began to sob piteously. Somehow it was the sudden memory of the almost comic kicking step which overwhelmed her with the most gruesome sense of awfulness—as if the world had come to an end.

"It was new—and they laughed so! They are killed!" she cried beating her little hands. He had just heard the same news. Five of them! And he had heard details she had been spared.

He was as pale as she. He stood before her quivering, hot and cold. Until this hour they had been living only through the early growing wonder of their dream; they had only talked together and exquisitely yearned and thrilled at the marvel of every simple word or hand-touch or glance, and every meeting had been a new delight. But now suddenly the being of each shook and called to the other in wild need of the nearer nearness which is comfort and help. It was early—early morning—the heath spread about them wide and empty, and at that very instant a skylark sprang from its hidden nest in the earth and circled upward to heaven singing as to God.

"They will take you!" she wailed. "You—you!" And did not know that she held out her arms.

But he knew—with a great shock of incredible rapture and tempestuous answering. He caught her softness to his thudding young chest and kissed her sobbing mouth, her eyes, her hair, her little pulsing throat.

"Oh, little love," he himself almost sobbed the words. "Oh, little lovely love!"

She melted into his arms like a weeping child. It was as if she had always rested there and it was mere Nature that he should hold and comfort her. But he had never heard or dreamed of the possibility of such anguish as was in her sobbing.

"They will take you!" she said. "And—you danced too. And I must not hold you back! And I must stay here and wait and wait—and wait—until some day—! Donal! Donal!"

He sat down with her amongst the gorse and held her on his knee as if she had been six years old. She did not attempt to move but crouched there and clung to him with both hands. She remembered only one thing—that he must go! And there were cannons—and shells singing and screaming! And boys like George in awful heaps. No laughing face as it had once looked—all marred and strange and piteously lonely as they lay.

It took him a long time to calm her terror and woe. When at last he had so far quieted her that her sobs came only at intervals she seemed to awaken to sudden childish awkwardness. She sat up and shyly moved. "I didn't mean—I didn't know—!" she quavered. "I am—I am sitting on your knee like a baby!" But he could not let her go.

"It is because I love you so," he answered in his compelling boy voice, holding her gently. "Don't move—don't move! There is no time to think and wait—or care for anything—if we love each other. We do love each other, don't we?" He put his cheek against hers and pressed it there. "Oh, say we do," he begged. "There is no time. And listen to the skylark singing!"

The butterfly-wing flutter of her lashes against his cheek as she pressed the softness of her own closer, and the quick exquisite indrawing of her tender, half-sobbing childish breath were unspeakably lovely answering things—though he heard her whisper.

"Yes, Donal! Donal!" And again, "Donal! Donal!"

And he held her closer and kissed her very gently again. And they sat and whispered that they loved each other and had always loved each other and would love each other forever and forever and forever. Poor enrapt children! It has been said before, but they said it again and yet again. And the circling skylark seemed to sing at the very gates of God's heaven.

So the tide rose to its high flowing.



CHAPTER VII

The days of gold which linked themselves one to another with strange dawns of pearl and exquisite awakenings, each a miracle, the gemmed night whose blue darkness seemed studded with myriads of new stars, the noons whose heats or rains were all warm scents of flowers and fragrant mists, wrought themselves into a chain of earthly beauty. The hour in which the links must break and the chain end was always a faint spectre veiled by kindly mists which seemed to rise hour by hour to soften and hide it.

But often in those days did it occur that the hurrying and changing visitors to the house in Eaton Square, glancing at Robin as she sat writing letters, or as she passed them in some hall or room, found themselves momentarily arrested in an almost startled fashion by the mere radiance of her.

"She is lovelier every time one turns one's head towards her," the Starling said—the Starling having become a vigorous worker and the Duchess giving welcome to any man, woman or child who could be counted on for honest help. "It almost frightens me to see her eyes when she looks up suddenly. It is like finding one's self too close to a star. A star in the sky is all very well—but a star only three feet away from one is a kind of shock. What has happened to the child?"

She said it to Gerald Vesey who between hours of military training was helping Harrowby to arrange a matinee for the benefit of the Red Cross. Harrowby had been rejected by the military authorities on account of defective sight and weak chest but had with a promptness unexpected by his friends merged himself into unprominent, useful hard work which frequently consisted of doing disagreeable small jobs men of his type generally shied away from.

"Something has happened to her," answered Vesey. "She has the flight of a skylark let out of a cage. Her moving is flight—not ordinary walking. I hope her work has kept her away from—well, from young gods and things."

"The streets are full of them," said Harrowby, "marching to defy death and springing to meet glory—marching not walking. Young Mars and Ajax and young Paris with Helen in his eyes. She might be some youngster's Helen! Why do you hope her work has kept her away?"

Vesey shook his Greek head with a tragic bitterness.

"Oh! I don't know," he groaned. "There's too much disaster piled high and staring in every one of their flushing rash young faces. On they go with their heads in the air and their hearts thumping, and hoping and refusing to believe in the devil and hell let loose—and the whole thing stares and gibbers at them."

But each day her eyes looked larger and more rapturously full of heavenly glowing, and her light movements were more like bird flight, and her swiftness and sweet readiness to serve delighted and touched people more, and they spoke oftener to and of her, and felt actually a thought uplifted from the darkness because she was like pure light's self.

Lord Coombe met her in the street one evening at twilight and he stopped to speak to her.

"I have just come from Darte Norham," he said to her. "The Duchess asked me to see you personally and make sure that you do not miss Dowie too much—that you are not lonely."

"I am very busy and am very well taken care of," was her answer. "The servants are very attentive and kind. I am not lonely at all, thank you. The Duchess is very good to me."

Donal evidently knew nothing of her reasons for disliking Lord Coombe. She could not have told him of them. He did not dislike his relative himself and in fact rather liked him in spite of the frigidity he sometimes felt. He, at any rate, admired his cold brilliance of mind. Robin could not therefore let herself detest the man and regard him as an enemy. But she did not like the still searching of the grey eyes which rested on her so steadily.

"The Duchess wished me to make sure that you did not work too enthusiastically. She desires you to take plenty of exercise and if you are tired to go into the country for a day or two of fresh air and rest. She recommends old Mrs. Bennett's cottage at Mersham Wood. The place is quite rustic though it is near enough to London to be convenient. You might come and go."

"She is too kind—too kind," said Robin. "Oh! how kind to think of me like that. I will write and thank her."

The sweet gratitude in her eyes and voice were touching. She could not speak steadily.

"I may tell her then that you are well taken care of and that you are happy," the grey eyes were a shade less cold but still searching and steady. "You look—happy."

"I never was so happy before. Please—please tell her that when you thank her for me," was Robin's quite yearning little appeal. She held out her hand to him for the first time in her life. "Thank you, Lord Coombe, for so kindly delivering her beautiful message."

His perfect manner did not record any recognition on his part of the fact that she had done an unexpected thing. But as he went on his way he was thinking of it.

"She is very happy for some reason," he thought. "Perhaps the rush and excitement of her new work exalts her. She has the ecstasied air of a lovely child on her birthday—with all her world filled with petting and birthday gifts."

The Duchess evidently extended her care to the extent of sending special messages to Mrs. James, the housekeeper, who began to exercise a motherly surveillance over Robin's health and diet and warmly to advocate long walks and country visits to the cottage at Mersham Wood.

"Her grace will be really pleased if you take a day or two while she's away. She's always been just that interested in those about her, Miss," Mrs. James argued. "She wouldn't like to come back and find you looking tired or pale. Not that there's much danger of that," quite beamingly. "For all your hard work, I must say you look—well, you look as I've never seen you. And you always had a colour like a new-picked rose."

The colour like a new-picked rose ran up to the rings of hair on the girl's forehead as if she were made a little shy.

"It is because her grace has been so good—and because every one is so kind to me," she said. "Kindness makes me happy."

She was so happy that she was never tired and was regarded as a young wonder in the matter of work and readiness and exactitude. Her accounts, her correspondence, her information were always in order. When she took the prescribed walks and in some aloof path or corner met the strong, slim khaki-clad figure, they walked or stood or sat closely side by side and talked of many things—though most of all they dwelt on one. She could ask Donal questions and he could throw light on such things as young soldiers knew better than most people. She came into close touch—a shuddering touch sometimes it was—with needs and facts concerning marchings and trenches and attacks and was therefore able to visualise and to speak definitely of necessities not always understood.

"How did you find that out?" little black-clad Lady Kathryn asked her one day. "I wish I had known it before George went away."

"A soldier told me," was her answer. "Soldiers know things we don't."

"The world is made of soldiers now," said Kathryn. "And one is always talking to them. I shall begin to ask them questions about small things like that."

It was the same morning that as they stood alone together for a few minutes Kathryn suddenly put her hand upon Robin's shoulder.

"You never—never feel the least angry—when you remember about George—the night of the dance," she pleaded shakily. "Do you, Robin? You couldn't now! Could you?"

Tears rushed into Robin's eyes.

"Never—never!" she said. "I always remember him—oh, quite differently! He——" she hesitated a second and began again. "He did something—so wonderfully kind—before he went away—something for me. That is what I remember. And his nice voice—and his good eyes."

"Oh! he was good! He was!" exclaimed Kathryn in a sort of despairing impatience. "So many of them are! It's awful!" And she sat down in the nearest chair and cried hopelessly into her crushed handkerchief while Robin tried to soothe—not to comfort her. There was no comfort to offer. And behind the rose tinted mists her own spectre merely pretended to veil itself.

* * * * *

When she lay in bed at night in her quiet room she often lay awake long and long for pure bliss. The world in which people were near—near—to one another and loved each other, the world Donal had always belonged to even when he was a little boy, she now knew and lived in. There was no loneliness in it. If there was pain or trouble some one who loved you was part of it and you, and so you could bear it. All the radiant mornings and heavenly nights, all the summer scents of flowers or hay or hedges in bloom, or new rain on the earth, were things felt just as that other one felt them and drew in their delights—exactly in the same way. Once in the night stillness of a sweet dark country lane she had stood in the circle of Donal's arm, her joyous, warm young breast against his and they had heard together the singing of a nightingale in a thicket.

"Let us stand still," he had whispered close to her ear. "Let us not speak a word—not a word. Oh! little lovely love! Let us only listen—and be happy!"

Almost every day there were marvels like this. And when they were apart she could not forget them but walked like a spirit strayed on to earth and unknowing of its radiance. This was why people glanced at her curiously and were sometimes vaguely troubled.



CHAPTER VIII

The other woman who loved and was loved by him moved about her world in these days with a face less radiant than the one people turned to look at in the street or in its passing through the house in Eaton Square. Helen Muir's eyes were grave and pondered. She had always known of the sometime coming of the hour in which would rise the shadow—to him a cloud of rapture—which must obscure the old clearness of vision which had existed between them. She had been too well balanced of brain to allow herself to make a tragedy of it or softly to sentimentalise of loss. It was mere living nature that it should be so. He would be as always, a beloved wonder of dearness and beauty when his hour came and she would look on and watch and be so cleverly silent and delicately detached from his shy, aloof young moods, his funny, dear involuntary secrets and reserves. But at any moment—day or night—at any elate emotional moment ready!

She had the rare accomplishment of a perfect knowledge of how to wait, and to wait—if necessary—long. When the first golden down had shown itself on his cheek and lip she had not noticed it too much and when his golden soprano voice began to change to a deeper note and annoyed him with its uncertainties she had spared him awkwardness by making him feel the transition a casual natural thing, instead of a personal and characteristic weakness. She had loved every stage of innocence and ignorance and adorable silliness he had passed through and he had grown closer to her through the medium of each, because nothing in life was so clear as her lovely wiseness and fine perceptive entirety of sympathy and poise.

"I never have to explain really," he said more than once. "You would understand even if I were an idiot or a criminal. And you'd understand if I were an archangel."

With a deep awareness she knew that, when she first realised that the shadow was rising, it would be different. She would have to watch it with an aloofness more delicate and yet more warmly sensitive than any other. In the days when she first thought of him as like one who is listening to a far-off sound, it seemed possible that in the clamour of louder echoes this one might lose itself and at last die away even from memory. It was youth's way to listen and youth's way to find it easy to forget. He heard many reverberations in these days and had much reason for thought and action. He thought a great deal, he worked energetically, he came and went, he read and studied, he obeyed orders and always stood ready for new ones. Her pride in his vigorous initiative and practical determination was a glowing flame in her heart. He meant to be no toy soldier.

As she became as practical a worker as he was, they did much together and made plans without ceasing. When he was away she was always doing things in which he was interested and when he returned he always brought to her suggestions for new service or the development of the old. But as the days passed and became weeks she knew that the far-off sound was still being listened to. She could not have told how—but she knew. And she saw the beloved dearness and beauty growing in him. He came into the house each day in his khaki as if khaki were a shining thing. When he laughed, or sat and smiled, or dreamed—forgetting she was there—her very heart quaked with delight in him. Another woman than Robin counted over his charms and made a tender list of them, wondering at each one. As a young male pheasant in mating time dons finer gloss and brilliancy of plumage, perhaps he too bloomed and all unconscious developed added colour and inches and gallant swing of tread. As people turned half astart to look at Robin bending over her desk or walking about among them in her modest dress, so also did they turn to look after him as he went in springing march along the streets.

"Some day he will begin to tell me," Helen used to say to herself at night. "He may only begin—but perhaps it will be to-morrow."

It was not, however, to-morrow—or to-morrow. And in the midst of his work he still listened. As he sat and dreamed he listened and sometimes he was very deep in thought—sitting with his arms folded and his eyes troubled and questioning of the space into which he looked. The time was really not very long, but it began to seem so to her.

"But some day—soon—he will tell me," she thought.

* * * * *

One afternoon Donal walked into a room where a number of well-dressed women were talking, drinking tea and knitting or crocheting. It had begun already to be the fashion for almost every woman to carry on her arm a work bag and produce from its depths at any moment without warning something she was making. In the early days the bag was usually highly decorated and the article being made was a luxury. Only a few serious and pessimistic workers had begun to produce plain usefulness and in this particular Mayfair drawing-room "the War" as yet seemed to present itself rather as a dramatic and picturesque social asset. A number of good-looking young officers moved about or sat in corners being petted and flirted with, while many of the women had the slightly elated excitement of air produced in certain of their sex by the marked preponderance of the presence of the masculine element. It was a thing which made for high spirits and laughs and amiable semi-caressing chaff. The women who in times of peace had been in the habit of referring to their "boys" were in these days in great form.

Donal had been taken to the place by an amusement-loving acquaintance who professed that a special invitation made it impossible to pass by without dropping in. The house was Mrs. Erwyn's and had already attracted attention through the recent debuts of Eileen and Winifred who had grown up very pretty and still retained their large, curious eyes and their tendency to giggle musically.

In very short and slimly alluring frocks they were assisting their mother in preparing young warriors for the seat of war by giving them chocolate in egg-shell cups and little cakes. Winifred carried a coral satin work-bag embroidered with carnations and was crocheting a silk necktie peculiarly suited to fierce onslaught on the enemy.

"Oh!" she gasped, clutching in secret at Eileen's sleeve when Donal entered the room. "There he is! Jack said he would make him come! Just look at him!"

"Gracious!" ejaculated Eileen. "I daren't look! It's not safe!"

They looked, however, to their irresistible utmost when he came to make his nice, well-behaved bow to his hostess.

"I love his bow," Eileen whispered. "It is such a beautiful tall bow. And he looks as good as he is beautiful."

"Oh! not good exactly!" protested Winifred. "Just sweet—as if he thinks you are quite as nice as himself."

He was taken from one group to another and made much of and flattered quite openly. He was given claret cup and feathery sandwiches and asked questions and given information. He was chattered to and whispered about and spent half an hour in a polite vortex of presentation. He was not as highly entertained as his companion was because he was thinking of something else—of a place which seemed incredibly far away from London drawing-rooms—even if he could have convinced himself that it existed on the same earth. The trouble was that he was always thinking of this place—and of others. He could not forget them even in the midst of any clamour of life. Sometimes he was afraid he forgot where he was and might look as if he were not listening to people. There were moments when he caught his breath because of a sudden high throb of his heart. How could he shut out of his mind that which seemed to be his mind—his body—the soul of him!

It was at a moment when he was thinking of this with a sudden sense of disturbance that a silver toned voice evidently speaking to him attracted his attention.

The voice was of silver and the light laugh was silvery.

"You look as if you were not thinking of any of us," the owner said.

He turned about to find himself looking at one of the prettiest of the filmily dressed creatures in the room. Her frock was one of the briefest and her tiny heels the highest and most slender. The incredible foot and ankle wore a flesh silk stocking so fine that it looked as though they were bare—which was the achievement most to be aspired to. Every atom of her was lovely and her small deep-curved mouth and pure large eyes were like an angel's.

"I believe you remember me!" she said after a second or so in which they held each other's gaze and Donal knew he began to flush slowly.

"Yes," he answered. "I do—now I have looked again. You were—The Lady Downstairs."

She flung out the silver laugh again.

"After all these years! After one has grown old and withered and wrinkled—and has a grown-up daughter."

He answered with a dazzling young-man-of-the-world bow and air. He had not been to Eton and Oxford and touched the outskirts of two or three London seasons, as a boy beauty and a modest Apollo Belvidere in his teens, without learning a number of pleasant little ways.

"You are exactly as you were the morning you came into the Gardens dressed in crocuses and daffodils. I thought they were daffodils and crocuses. I said so to my mother afterwards."

He did not like her but he knew how her world talked to her. And he wanted to hear her speak—The Lady Downstairs—who had not "liked" the soft-eyed, longing, warm little lonely thing.

"All people say of you is entirely true," she said. "I did not believe it at first but I do now." She patted the seat of the small sofa she had dropped on. "Come and sit here and talk to me a few minutes. Girls will come and snatch you away presently but you can spare about three minutes."

He did as he was told and wondered as he came nearer to the shell fineness of her cheek and her seraphic smile.

"I want you to tell me something about my only child," she said.

He hoped very much that he did not flush in his sometimes-troublesome blond fashion then. He hoped so.

"I shall be most happy to tell you anything I have the honour of knowing," he answered. "Only ask."

"You would be capable of putting on a touch of Lord Coombe's little stiff air—if you were not so young and polite," she said. "It was Lord Coombe who told me about the old Duchess' dance—and that you tangoed or swooped—or kicked with my Robin. He said both of you did it beautifully."

"Miss Gareth-Lawless did—at least."

He was looking down and so did not chance to see the look of a little cat which showed itself in her quick side glance.

"She is not my Robin now. She belongs to the Dowager Duchess of Darte—for a consideration. She is one of the new little females who are obstinately determined to earn an honest living. I haven't seen her for months—perhaps years. Is she pretty?" The last three words came out like the little cat's pounce on a mouse. Donal even felt momentarily startled.

But he remained capable of raising clear eyes to hers and saying, "She was prettier than any one else at the Duchess' house that night. Far prettier."

"Have you never seen her since?"

This was a pounce again and he was quite aware of it.

"Yes."

Feather gurgled.

"That was really worthy of Lord Coombe," she said. "I wasn't being pushing, really, Mr. Muir. If any one asks you your intentions it will be the Dowager—not little Miss Gareth-Lawless' mother. I never pretended to chaperon Robin. She might run about all over London without my asking any questions. I am afraid I am not much of a mother. I am not in the least like yours."

"Like mine?" He wondered why his mother should be so suddenly dragged in.

She laughed with a bright air of being much entertained.

"Do you remember how Mrs. Muir whisked you away from London the day after she found out that you were playing with my vagabond of a Robin—unknowing of your danger? There was a mother for you! It nearly killed my little pariah."

She rose and held out her hand.

"I have not really had my three minutes, but 'I must not detain you any longer,' as Royal Highnesses say. I must go."

"Why?" he ejaculated with involuntary impatience.

"Because Eileen Erwyn is standing with her back markedly turned towards us, pretending to talk. I know the expression of her little ears and she has just laid them back close to her head, which means business. Why do you all at once look quite like Lord Coombe?" Perhaps he did look a trifle like his relative. He had risen to his feet.

"I was not aware that I was whisked away from London," he said.

"I was," with pretty impudence. "You were bundled back to Scotland almost before daylight. Lord Coombe knew about it. We laughed immensely together. It was a great joke because Robin fainted and fell into the mud, or something of the sort, when you didn't turn up the next morning. She almost pined away and died of grief, tiresome little thing! I told you Eileen was preparing to assault. Here she is! Hordes of girls will now advance upon you. So glad to have had you even for a few treasured seconds. Good afternoon."



CHAPTER IX

It was not a long time before he had left the house, but it seemed long and as if he had thought a great many rather incoherent things before he had reached the street and presently parted from his gay acquaintance and was on his way to his mother's house where she was spending a week, having come down from Scotland as she did often.

He walked all the way home because he wanted movement. He also wanted time to think things over because the intensity of his own mood troubled him. It was new for him to think much about himself, but lately he had found himself sometimes wondering at, as well as shaken by, emotional mental phases through which he passed. A certain moving fancy always held its own in his thoughts—as a sort of background to them. It was in his feeling that he was in those weeks a Donal Muir who was unknown and unseen by the passing world. No one but himself—and Robin—could know the meaning, the feeling, the nature of this Donal. It was as if he lived in a new Dimension of whose existence other people did not know. He could not have explained because it would not have been understood. He could vaguely imagine that effort at explanation would end—even begin—by being so clumsy that it would be met by puzzled or unbelieving smiles.

To walk about—to sleep—to awaken surrounded by rarefied light and air in which no object or act or even word or thought wore its past familiar meaning, or to go about the common streets, feeling as though somehow one were apart and unseen, was a singular thing. Having had a youth filled with quite virile pleasures and delightful emotions—and to be lifted above them into other air and among other visions—was, he told himself, like walking in a dream. To be filled continually with one thought, to rebel against any obstacle in the path to one desire, and from morning until night to be impelled by one eagerness for some moment or hour for which there was reason enough for its having place in the movings of the universe, if it brought him face to face with what he must stand near to—see—hear—perhaps touch.

It was because of the world's madness, because of the human fear and weeping everywhere, because of the new abysses which seemed to yawn every day on every side, that both soul and senses were so abnormally overstrung. He was overwhelmed by exquisite compassions in his thoughts of Robin, he was afraid for her youngness, her sweetness, the innocent defencelessness which was like a child's. He was afraid of his own young rashness and the entrancement of the dream. The great lunging chariot of War might plunge over them both.

But never for one moment could he force himself to regret or repent. Boys in their twenties already lay in their thousands on the fields over there. And she would far, far rather remember the kind hours and know that they were hidden in his heart for him to remember as he died—if he died! She had lain upon his breast holding him close and fast and she had sobbed hard—hard—but she had said it again and again and over and over when he had asked her.

It was this aspect of her and things akin to it which had risen in his incoherent thoughts when he was manoeuvering to get away from the drawing-room full of chattering people. He knew himself overwhelmed again by the exquisite compassion because the thing Mrs. Gareth-Lawless had told him had brought back all the silent anguish of impotent childish rebellion the morning when he had been awakened before the day, and during the day when he had thought his small breast would burst as the train rushed on with him—away—away!

And Robin had told him the rest—sitting one afternoon in the same chair with him—a roomy, dingy red arm-chair in an old riverside inn where they had managed to meet and had spent a long rainy day together. She had told him—in a queer little strained voice—about the waiting—and waiting—and waiting. And about the certainty of her belief in his coming. And the tiny foot which grew numb. And the slow lump climbing in her throat. And the rush under the shrubs—and the beating hands—and cries—and of the rose dress and socks and crushed hat covered with mud. She had not been piteous or dramatic. She had been so simple that she had broken his heart in two and he had actually hidden his face in her hair.

"Oh! Donal, dear. You're crying!" she had said and she had broken down too and for a few seconds they had cried together rocking in each other's arms, while the rain streamed down the window panes and beautifully shut them in, since there are few places more enclosing than the little, dingy private parlour of a remote English inn on a ceaselessly rainy day.

It had all come back before he reached the house in Kensington whose windows looked into the thick leaves of the plane trees. And at the same time he knew that the burning anger which kept rising in him was perhaps undue and not quite fair. But he was thinking it had not been mere cruel chance—it could have been helped—it need never have been! It had been the narrow cold hard planning of grown-up people who knew that they were powerful enough to enforce any hideous cruelty on creatures who had no defence. He actually found his heated mind making a statement of the case as wild as this and its very mercilessness of phrase checked him. The grown-up person had been his mother—his long-beloved—and he was absolutely calling her names. He pulled himself up vigorously and walked very fast. But the heat did not quite die down and other thoughts surged up in spite of his desire to keep his head and be reasonably calm. There had been a certain narrowness in the tragic separation of two happy children if the only reason for it had been that the mother of one was a pretty, frivolous, much gossiped about woman belonging to a rather too rapid set. And if it had been a reason then, how would it present itself now? What would happen to an untouched dream if argument and disapproval crashed into it? If his first intensely passionate impulse had been his desire to save it even from the mere touch of ordinary talk and smiling glances because he had felt that they would spoil the perfect joy of it, what would not open displeasure and opposition make of the down on the butterfly's wing—the bloom on the peach? It was not so he phrased in his thoughts the things which tormented him, but the figures would have expressed his feeling. What if his mother were angry—though he had never seen her angry in his life and could only approach the idea because he had just found out that she had once been cruel—yes, it had been cruel! What if Coombe actually chose to interfere. Coombe with his unmoving face, his perfection of exact phrase and his cold almost inhuman eye! After all the matter concerned him closely.

"While Houses threaten to crumble and Heads may fall into the basket there are things we must remember until we disappear," he had said not long ago with this same grey eye fixed on him. "I have no son. If Marquisates continue to exist you will be the Head of the House of Coombe."

What would he make of a dream if he handled it? What would there be left? Donal's heart burned in his side when he recalled Feather's impudent little laugh as she had talked of her "vagabond Robin," her "small pariah." He was a boy entranced and exalted by his first passion and because he was a sort of young superman it was not a common one, though it shared all the unreason and impetuous simplicities of the most rudimentary of its kind. He could not think very calmly or logically; both the heaven and the earth in him swept him along as with the rush of the spheres. It was Robin who was foremost in all his thoughts. It was because she was so apart from all the world that it had seemed beautiful to keep her so in his heart. She had always been so aloof a little creature—so unclaimed and naturally left alone. Perhaps that was why she had retained through the years the untouched look which he had recognised even at the dance, in the eyes which only waited exquisitely for kindness and asked for love. No one had ever owned her, no one really knew her—people only saw her loveliness—no one knew her but himself—the little beautiful thing—his own—his own little thing! Nothing on earth should touch her!

Because his thinking ended—as it naturally always did—in such thoughts as these last, he was obliged to turn back when he saw the plane trees and walk a few hundred feet in the opposite direction to give himself time. He even turned a corner and walked down another street. It was just as he turned that poignant chance brought him face to face with a girl in deep new mourning with the border of white crepe in the brim of her close hat. Her eyes were red and half-closed with recent crying and she had a piteous face. He knew what it all meant and involuntarily raised his hand in salute. He scarcely knew he did it and for a second she seemed not to understand. But the next second she burst out crying and hurriedly took out her handkerchief and hid her face as she passed. One of the boys lying on the blood-wet mire in Flanders, was Donal's bitter thought, but he had had his kind hours to recall at the last moment—and even now she had them too.

Helen Muir from her seat at the window looking into the thick leafage of the trees saw him turn at the entrance and heard him mount the steps. The days between them and approaching separation were growing shorter and shorter. She thought this every morning when she awakened and realised anew that the worst of it all was that neither knew how short they were and that the thing which was to happen would be sudden—as death is always sudden however long one waits. He had never reached even that beginning of the telling—whatsoever he had to tell. Perhaps it was coming now. She had tried to prepare herself by endeavouring to imagine how he would look when he began—a little shy—even a little lovably awkward? But his engaging smile—his quite darling smile—would show itself in spite of him as it always did.

But when he came into the room his look was a new one to her. It was not happy—it was not a free look. There was something like troubled mental reservation in it—and when had there ever been mental reservation between them? Oh, no—that must not—must not be now! Not now!

He sat down with his cap in his hand as if he had forgotten to lay it aside or as if he were making a brief call.

"What has happened, Donal?" she said. "Have you come to tell me that—?"

"No, not that—though that may come any moment now. It is something else."

"What else?"

"I don't know how to begin," he said. "There has never been anything like this before. But I must know from you that a—silly woman—has not been telling me spiteful lies. She is the kind of woman who would say anything it amused her to say."

"What was it she said?"

"I was dragged into a house by Clonmel. He said he had promised to drop in to tea. There were a lot of people. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless was there and began to talk to me."

"Why did you think she might be telling you spiteful lies?"

"That is it," he broke out miserably impetuous. "Perhaps it may all seem childish and unimportant to you. But you have always been perfect. You were the one perfect being. I have never doubted you—"

"Do you doubt me now?"

"Perhaps no one but myself could realise that a sort of sore spot—yes, a sore spot—was left in my mind for years because of a wretched thing which happened when I was a child. Did you deliberately take me back to Scotland so suddenly that early morning? Was it a thing which could have been helped?"

"I thought not, Donal. Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I was right."

"Was it because you wanted to separate me from a child I was fond of?"

"Yes."

"And your idea was that because her mother was a flighty woman with bad taste and the wrong surrounding her poor little girl would contaminate me?"

"It was because her mother was a light woman and all her friends were like her. And your affection for the child was not like a child's affection."

"No, it wasn't," he said and he leaned forward with his forehead in his hands.

"I wanted to put an end to it before it was too late. I saw nothing but pain in it for you. It filled me with heart-broken fear to think of the girl such a mother and such a life would make."

"She was such a little thing—" said Donal, "—such a tender mite of a thing! She's such a little thing even now."

"Is she?" said Helen.

Now she knew he would not tell her. And she was right. Up to that afternoon there had always been the chance that he would. Night after night he had been on the brink of telling her of the dream. Only as the beauty and wonder of it grew he had each day given himself another day, and yet another and another. But he had always thought the hour would come and he had been sure she would not grudge him a moment he had held from her. Now he shut everything within himself.

"I wish you had not done it. It was a mistake," was all he said. Suddenly he felt thrown back upon himself, heartsick and cold. For the first time in his life he could not see her side of the question. The impassioned egotism of first love overwhelmed him.

"You met her on the night of the old Duchess' dance," Helen said.

"Yes."

"You have met her since?"

"Yes."

"It is useless for older people to interfere," she said. "We have loved each other very much. We have been happy together. But I can do nothing to help you. Oh! Donal, my own dear!"

Her involuntary movement of putting her hand to her throat was a piteous gesture.

"You are going away," she pleaded. "Don't let anything come between us—not now! It is not as if you were going to stay. When you come back perhaps—"

"I may never come back," he answered and as he said it he saw again the widowed girl who had hurried past him crying because he had saluted her. And he saw Robin as he had seen her the night before—Robin who belonged to no one—whom no one missed at any time when she went in or out—who could come and go and meet a man anywhere as if she were the only little soul in London. And yet who had always that pretty, untouched air.

"I only wanted to be sure. It was a mistake. We will never speak of it again," he added.

"If it was a mistake, forgive it. It was only because I could not hear that your life should not be beautiful. These are not like other days. Oh! Donal my dear, my dear!" And she broke into weeping and took him in her arms and he held her and kissed her tenderly. But whatsoever happened—whatsoever he did he knew that if he was to save and hold his bliss to the end he could not tell her now.



CHAPTER X

Mrs. Bennett's cottage on the edge of Mersham Wood seemed to Robin when she first saw it to be only a part of a fairy tale. It is true that only in certain bits of England and in pictures in books of fairy tales did one see cottages of its kind, and in them always lived with their grandmothers—in the fairy stories as Robin remembered—girls who would in good time be discovered by wandering youngest sons of fairy story kings. The wood of great oaks and beeches spread behind and at each side of it and seemed to have no end in any land on earth. It nestled against its primaeval looking background in a nook of its own. Under the broad branches of the oaks and beeches tall ferns grew so thick that they formed a forest of their own—a lower, lighter, lacy forest where foxglove spires pierced here and there, and rabbits burrowed and sniffed and nibbled, and pheasants hid nests and sometimes sprang up rocketting startlingly. Birds were thick in the wood and trilled love songs, or twittered and sang low in the hour before their bedtime, filling the twilight with clear adorable sounds. The fairy-tale cottage was whitewashed and its broad eaved roof was thatched. Hollyhocks stood in haughty splendour against its walls and on either side its path. The latticed windows were diamond-paned and their inside ledges filled with flourishing fuchsias and trailing white campanula, and mignonette. The same flowers grew thick in the crowded blooming garden. And there were nests in the hawthorn hedge. And there was a small wicket gate.

When Robin caught sight of it she wondered—for a moment—if she were going to cry. Only because it was part of the dream and could be nothing else—unless one wakened.

On the tiny porch covered with honeysuckle in bloom, a little, old fairy woman was sitting knitting a khaki sock very fast. She wore a clean print gown and a white apron and a white cap with a frilled border. She had a stick and a nutcracker face and a pair of large iron bowed spectacles. She was so busy that she did not seem to hear Robin as she walked up the path between the borders of pinks and snapdragons, but when she was quite close to her she glanced up.

Robin thought she looked almost frightened when she saw her. She got up and made an apologetic curtsey.

"Eh!" she ejaculated, "to think of me not hearing you. I do beg your pardon, Miss, I do that. I was really waiting here to be ready for you."

"Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Bennett," Robin answered in a sweet hurry to reassure her. "I hope you are very well." And she held out her hand.

Mrs. Bennett had only been shocked at her own apparent inattention to duty. She was not really frightened and her nutcracker face illuminated itself with delighted smiles.

"I don't hear very well at the best of times," she said. "And I've got a bit of a cold. Just worry, Miss, just worry it is—along of this 'ere war and my grandsons going marching off every few days seems like. Dick, that's the youngest as was always my pet, he's the last and he'll be off any minute—and these is his socks."

Robin actually picked up a sock and patted it softly—with a childish quiver of her chin. It seemed alive.

"Yes, yes!" she said. "Oh! dear! Oh! dear!"

Mrs. Bennett winked tears out of her eyes hastily.

"Me being hard of hearing is no excuse for me talking about myself first thing. Dick, he's an Englishman—and they're all Englishmen—and it's Englishmen that's got to stand up and do their duty—same as they did at Waterloo." She swallowed valiantly the lump in her throat. "Her grace wrote to me about you, Miss, with her own kind hand. She said the cottage was so quiet and pretty you wouldn't mind it being little—and me being a bit deaf."

"I shall mind nothing," said Robin. She raised her voice and tried to speak very distinctly so as to make sure that the old fairy woman would hear her. "It is the most beautiful cottage I ever saw in my life. It is like a cottage in a fairy story."

"That's what the vicar says, Miss, my dear," was Mrs. Bennett's cheerful reply. "He says it ought to be hid some way because if the cheap trippers found it out they'd wear the life out of me with pestering me to give 'em six-penny teas. They'd get none from me!" quite fiercely. "Her grace give it to me her own self and it's on Mersham land and not a lawyer on earth could put me out."

She became quite active and bustling—picking a spray of honeysuckle and a few sprigs of mignonette from near the doorway and handing them to Robin.

"Your room's full of 'em," she said, "them and musk and roses. You'll sleep and wake in the midst of flowers and birds singing and bees humming. And I can give you rich milk and home-baked bread, God bless you! You are welcome. Come in, my pretty dear—Miss."

The girl came down from London to the cottage on the wood's edge several times during the weeks that followed. It was easy to reach and too beautiful and lone and strange to stay away from. The War ceased where the wood began. Mrs. Bennett delighted in her and, regarding the Duchess as a sort of adored deity, would have served her lodger on bended knee if custom had permitted. Robin could always make her hear, and she sat and listened so tenderly to her stories of her grandsons that there grew up between them an absolute affection.

"And yet we don't see each other often," the old fairy woman had said. "You flit in like, and flit away again as if you was a butterfly, I think sometimes when I'm sitting here alone. When you come to stay you're mostly flitting about the wood and I only see you bit by bit. But I couldn't tell you, Miss, my dear, what it's like to me. You do love the wood, don't you? It's a fairy place too—same as this is."

"It's all fairy, Mrs. Bennett," Robin said. "Perhaps I am a fairy too when I am here. Nothing seems quite earthly."

She bent forward suddenly and took the old face in her hands and kissed it.

"Eh! I shouldn't wonder," the old fairy woman chuckled sweetly. "I used to hear tales of fairies in Devonshire in my young days. And you do look like something witched—but you've been witched for happiness. Babies look that way for a bit sometimes—as if they brought something with them when they come to earth."

"Yes," answered Robin. "Yes."

It was true that she only flitted in and out, and that she spent hours in the depths of the wood, and always came back as if from fairy land.

Once she had a holiday of nearly a week. She came down from town one afternoon in a pretty white frock and hat and white shoes and with an air of such delicate radiance about her that Mrs. Bennett would have clutched her to her breast, but for long-ago gained knowledge of the respect due to those connected with great duchesses.

"Like a new young bride you look, my pretty dear—Miss," she cried out when she first saw her as she came up the path between the hollyhocks in the garden. "God's surely been good to you this day. There's something like heaven in your face." Robin stood still a moment looking like the light at dawn and breathing with soft quickness as if she had come in haste.

"God has been good to me for a long time," she said.

* * * * *

In the deep wood she walked with Donal night after night when the stillness was like heaven itself. Now and then a faint rustle among the ferns or the half awakened movement and sleepy note of a bird in the leaves slightly stirred the silence, but that was all. Lances of moonlight pierced through the branches and their slow feet made no sound upon the thick moss. Here and there pale foxglove spires held up their late blossoms like flower spirits in the dim light.

Donal thought—the first night she came to him softly through the ferns—that her coming was like that of some fair thing not of earth—a vision out of some old legend or ancient poem of faery. But he marched towards her, soldierly—like a young Lohengrin whose silver mail had changed to khaki. There was no longer war in the world—there never had been.

"I brought it with me," he said and took her close in his arms. For a few minutes the wood seemed more still than before.

"Do you hear my heart beat?" he said at last.

"I feel it. Do you hear mine?" she whispered.

"We love each other so!" he breathed. "We love each other so!"

"Yes," she answered. "Yes."

Did every one who saw him know how beautiful he was? Oh his smile that loved her so and made her feel there was no fear or loneliness left on earth! He was so tall and straight and strong—a young soldier statue! When he laughed her heart always gave a strange little leap. It was such a lovely sound. His very hands were beautiful—with long, strong smooth fingers and smooth firm palms. Oh! Donal! Donal! And while she smiled as a little angel might smile, small sobs of joy filled her throat.

They sat together among the ferns, close side by side. He showed her the thing he had brought with him. It was a very slender chain of gold with a plain gold ring hung on it. He put the chain around her neck but slipped the ring on her finger and kissed it again and again.

"Wear it when we are together," he whispered. "I want to see it. It makes you mine as much as if I had put it on in a church with a huge organ playing."

"I should be yours without it," answered Robin. "I am yours."

"Yes," he whispered again. "You are mine. And I am yours. It always was so—since the morning stars sang together."



CHAPTER XI

"There are more women than those in Belgium who are being swept over by the chariots of war and trampled on by marching feet," the Duchess of Darte said to a group of her women friends on a certain afternoon.

The group had met to work and some one had touched on a woeful little servant-maid drama which had painfully disclosed itself in her household. A small, plain kitchen maid had "walked out" in triumphant ecstasy with a soldier who, a few weeks after bidding her good-bye, had been killed in Belgium. She had been brought home to her employer's house by a policeman who had dragged her out of the Serpentine. An old story had become a modern one. In her childish ignorance and terror of her plight she had seen no other way, but she had not had courage to face more than very shallow water, with the result of finding herself merely sticking in the mud and wailing aloud.

"The policeman was a kind-hearted, sensible fellow," said the relator of the incident. "He had a family of his own and what he said was 'She looked such a poor little drowned rat of a thing I couldn't make up my mind to run her in, ma'am. This 'ere war's responsible for a lot more than what the newspapers tell about. Young chaps in uniform having to brace up and perhaps lying awake in the night thinking over what the evening papers said—and young women they've been sweet-heartin' with—they get wild, in a way, and cling to each other and feel desperate—and he talks and she cries—and he may have his head blown off in a week's time. And who wonders that there's trouble.' Do you know he actually told me that there were a number of girls he was keeping a watch on. He said he'd begun to recognise a certain look in their eyes when they walked alone in the park. He said it was a 'stark, frightened look.' I didn't know what he meant, but it gave me a shudder."

"I think I know," said the Duchess. "Poor, wretched children! There ought to be a sort of moratorium in the matter of social laws. The old rules don't hold. We are facing new conditions. This is a thing for women to take in hand, practically, as they are taking in hand other work. It must be done absolutely without prejudice. There is no time to lecture or condemn or even deplore. There is only time to try to heal wounds and quiet maddening pain and save life."

Lady Lothwell took the subject up.

"In the country places and villages, where the new army is swarming to be billeted, the clergymen and their wives are greatly agitated. Even in times of peace one's vicar's wife tells one stories in shocked whispers of 'immorality'—though the rustic mind does not seem to regard it as particularly immoral. An illegal baby is generally accepted with simple resignation or merely a little fretful complaint even in quite decent cottages. It is called—rather prettily, I think—'a love child' and the nicer the grandparents are, the better they treat it. Mrs. Gracey, the wife of our rector at Mowbray Wells told me a few days ago that she and her husband were quite in despair over the excited, almost lawless, holiday air of the village girls. There are so many young men about and uniforms have what she calls 'such a dreadful effect.' Giddy and unreliable young women are wandering about the lanes and fields with stranger sweethearts at all hours. Even girls who have been good Sunday-school scholars are becoming insubordinate. She did not in the least mean to be improperly humorous—in fact she was quite tragic when she said that the rector felt that he ought to marry, on the spot, every rambling couple he met. He had already performed the ceremony in a number of cases when he felt it was almost criminally rash and idiotic, or would have been in time of peace."

"That was what I meant by speaking of the women who were being swept over by the chariot of war," said the Duchess. "It involves issues the women who can think must hold in their minds and treat judicially. One cannot moralise and be shocked before an advancing tidal wave. It has always been part of the unreason and frenzy of times of war. When Death is near, Life fights hard for itself. It does not care who or what it strikes."

* * * * *

The tidal wave swept on and the uninitiated who formed the mass of humanity in every country in the world, reading with feverish anxiety almost hourly newspaper extras every day, tried to hide a secret fear that no one knew what was really happening or could trust to the absolute truth of any spoken or published statement. The exultant hope of to-day was dashed to-morrow. The despair of the morning was lightened by gleams of hope before night closed, and was darkened and lightened again and again. Great cities and towns aroused themselves from a half-somnolent belief in security. Village by village England awakened to what she faced in common with an amazed and half incredulous world. The amazement and incredulity were founded upon a certain mistaken belief in a world predominance of the laws of decency and civilisation. The statement of piety and morality that the world in question was a bad one, filled with crime, had somehow so far been accepted with a guileless reservation in the matter of a ruling majority whose lapses from virtue were at least not openly vaunted treachery, blows struck at any unprepared back presenting itself, merciless attacks on innocence and weakness, and savage gluttings of lust, of fury, with exultant paeans of self-glorification and praise of a justly applauding God. Before such novelty of onslaught the British mind had breathless moments of feeling itself stupid and incapably aghast. But after its first deep draughts of the cup of staggering the nation braced up a really muscular back and stood upon hard, stout legs and firm feet, immovable and fixed on solid British earth.

Incompetent raw troops gathered from fields, shops and desks, half trained, half clad, half armed, according to pessimistic report, fared forth across the narrow Channel and did strangely competent things—this being man's way when in dire moments needs must be. Riff-raff exalted itself and also died competently enough. The apparently aimless male offspring of the so-called useless rich and great died competently enough with the rest. The Roll of Honour raked fore and aft. The youngsters who had tangoed best and had shone in cabarets were swept away as grass by scythes.

"Will any one be left?" white Robin shuddered, clinging to Donal in the wood at night. "Every day there are new ones. Almost every one who has gone! Kathryn says that no one—no one will ever come back!"

"Hush—sh! Hush—sh!" whispered Donal. "Hush—sh! little lovely love!" And his arms closed so tightly around her that she could for a few moments scarcely breathe.

The Duchess had much work for her to do and was glad to see that the girl looked well and untired. When she was at home in Eaton Square her grace was even more strict about the walks and country holidays than she had been when she was away.

"Health and strength were never so much needed," she said. "We must keep our bodies in readiness for any test or strain."

This notwithstanding, there was at last a morning when Robin looked as though she had not slept well. It was so unusual a thing that the Duchess spoke of it.

"I hope you have not been sitting up late at your work?" she said.

"No. Thank you," Robin answered. "I went to bed last night at ten o'clock."

The Duchess looked at her seriously. Never before had she seen her with eyes whose misted heaviness suggested tears. Was it possible that there seemed something at once strained and quivering about her mouth—as if she were making an effort to force the muscles to hold it still.

"I hope you would tell me if you had a headache. You must, you know, my dear."

Robin's slight movement nearer to her had the air of being almost involuntary—as if it were impelled by an uncontrollable yearning to be a little near something—some one. The strained and quivering look was even more noticeable and her lifted eyes singularly expressed something she was trying to hold back.

"Thank you—indeed!" she said. "But it isn't headache. It is—things I could not help thinking about in the night."

The Duchess took her hand and patted it with firm gentleness.

"You mustn't, my dear. You must try hard not to do it. We shall be of no use if we let our minds go. We must try to force ourselves into a sort of deafness and blindness in certain directions. I am trying—with all my might."

"I know I must," Robin answered not too steadily. "I must—more than most people. I'm not brave and strong. I'm weak and cowardly—cowardly." Her breath caught itself and she went on quickly, "Work helps more than anything else. I want to work all the time. Please may I begin the letters now?"

She was bending over her desk when Lord Coombe came in earlier than was his custom. The perfection of his dress, his smooth creaselessness and quiet harmony of color and line seemed actually to add to the aged look of his face. His fine rigidity was worn and sallowed. After his greeting phrases he stood for a space quite silent while the Duchess watched him as if waiting.

"He has gone?" she said presently. She spoke in quite a low voice, but it reached Robin's desk.

"Yes. At dawn. The suddenness and secrecy of these goings add to the poignancy of them. I saw him but he did not see me. I found out the hour and made an effort. He is not my boy, but I wanted to look at him. It was perhaps for the last time. Good God! What a crime!"

He spoke low himself and rather quickly and with a new tone in his voice—as if he had been wrenched and was in pain.

"I am not in a heroic mood. I was only sick and furious when I watched them go by. They were a handsome, clean-built lot. But he stood out—the finest among them. His mere beauty and strength brought hideous thoughts into one's mind—thoughts of German deviltries born of hell."

Robin was looking at her hand which had stopped writing. She could not keep it still. She must get up and go to her own rooms. Would her knees shake under her like that when she tried to stand on her feet? The low talking went on and she scarcely heard what was said. She and Donal had always known this was coming; they had known it even the first day they had talked together in the Garden. The knowledge had been the spectre always waiting hidden at some turn in the path ahead. That was why they had been so frightened and desperate and hurried. They had clung together and shut their eyes and caught at the few hours—the few heavenly hours. He had said it would come suddenly. But she had not thought it would be as sudden as this. Last night a soldier had brought a few wild, passionate blotted lines to her. Yes, they had been blotted and blistered. She pushed her chair back and began to rise from it.

There had been a few seconds of dead silence. Lord Coombe had been standing thinking and biting his lip. "He is gone!" he said. "Gone!"

They did not notice Robin as she left the room. Outside the door she stood in the hall and looked up the staircase piteously. It looked so long and steep that she felt it was like a path up a mountain. But she moved towards the bottom step and began to climb stair by stair—stair by stair—dragging at the rail of the balustrade.

When she reached her room she went in and shut the door. She fell down upon the floor and sat there. Long ago his mother had taken him away from her. Now the War had taken him. The spectre stood straight in the path before her.

"It was such a short time," she said, shaking. "And he is gone. And the fairy wood is there still—and the ferns!—All the nights—always!"

And what happened next was not a thing to be written about—though at the time the same thing was perhaps at that very hour happening in houses all over England.



CHAPTER XII

The effect of something like unreality produced in the mind of the mature and experienced by a girl creature, can only be equaled by the intensity of the sense of realness in the girl herself. That centre of the world in which each human being exists is in her case more poignantly a centre than any other. She passes smiling or serious, a thing of untried eyes and fair unmarked smoothness of texture, and onlookers who have lived longer than she know that the unmarked untriedness is a sign that so far "nothing" has happened in her life and in most cases believe that "nothing" is happening. They are quite sure they know—long after the thing has ceased to be true. The surface of her is so soft and fair, and its lack of any suggestion of abysses or chasms seems to make them incredible things. But the centre of the world contains all things and when one is at the beginning of life and sees them for the first time they assume strange proportions. It enters a room, it talks lightly or sweetly, it whirls about in an airy dance, this pretty untested thing; and, among those for whom the belief in the reality of strange proportions has modified itself through long experience, only those of the thinking habit realise that at any moment the testing—the marking with deep scores may begin or has perhaps begun already. At eighteen or twenty a fluctuation of flower-petal tint which may mean an imperfect night can signify no really important cause. What could eighteen or twenty have found to think about in night watches? But in its centre of the world as it stands on the stage with the curtain rolling up, those who have lived longer—so very long—are only the dim audience sitting in the shadowy auditorium looking on at passionately real life with which they have really nothing whatever to do, because what they have seen is past and what they have learned has lost its importance and meaning with the changing of the years. The lying awake and tossing on pillows—if lying awake there is—has its cause in real joys—or griefs—not in things atrophied by time. So it seems on the stage, in the first act. If the curtain goes down on anguish and despair it seems equally the pitiless truth that it can never rise again; the play is ended; the lights go out forever; the theatre crumbles to dust; the world comes to an end. But the dim audience sitting in the shadow do not generally know this.

To those who came in and out of the house in Eaton Square the figure sitting at the desk writing letters or taking orders from the Duchess was that of the unconsidered and unreal girl. Among the changing groups of women with intensely absorbed and often strained faces the kind-hearted observing ones were given to noticing Robin and speaking to her almost affectionately because she was so attractive an object as well as so industriously faithful to her work. Girls who were Jacqueminot-rose flushed and who looked up to answer people with eyes like an antelope's were not customarily capable of concentrating their attention entirely upon brief letters of request and lists of necessaries for hospitals and comfort kits. This type was admitted to be frequently found readier for service in the preparation of entertainments "for the benefit of"—more especially when such benefits took the form of dancing. But the Duchess' little Miss Lawless came and went on errands, wasting no time. She never forgot things or was slack in any way. Her antelope eyes expressed a kind of yearning eagerness to do all she could without a moment's delay.

"She works as if it were a personal thing with her," Lady Lothwell once said thoughtfully. "I have seen girls wear that look when they are war brides or have lovers or brothers at the front."

But she remained to the world generally only a rather specially lovely specimen of the somewhat unreal young being with whom great agonies and terrors had but little to do.

On a day when the Duchess had a cold and was obliged to remain in her room Robin was with her, writing and making notes of instruction at her bedside. In the afternoon a cold and watery sun making its way through the window threw a chill light on her as she drew near with some papers in her hand. It was the revealing of this light which made the Duchess look at her curiously.

"You are not quite as blooming as you were, my child," she said. "About two months ago you were particularly blooming. Lady Lothwell and Lord Coombe and several other people noticed it. You have not been taking your walks as regularly as you did. Let me look at you." She took her hand and drew her nearer. "No. This will not do."

Robin stood very still.

"How could any one be blooming!" broke from her.

"You are thinking about things in the night again," said the Duchess.

"Yes," said Robin. "Every night. Sometimes all night."

The Duchess watched her anxiously.

"It's so—lonely!" There was a hint of hysteric breakdown in the exclamation. "How can I—bear it!" She turned and went back to her writing table and there she sat down and hid her face, trembling in an extraordinary way.

"You are as unhappy as that?" said the Duchess. "And you are lonely?"

"All the world is lonely," Robin cried—not weeping, only shaking. "Everything is left to itself to suffer. God has gone away."

The Duchess trembled a little herself. She too had hideously felt something like the same thing at times of late. But this soft shaking thing—! There shot into her mind like a bolt a sudden thought. Was this something less inevitable—something more personal? She wondered what would be best to say.

"Even older people lose their nerve sometimes," she decided on at last. "When you said that work was the greatest help you were right. Work—and as much sleep as one can get, and walking and fresh air. And we must help each other—old and young. I want you to help me, child. I need you."

Robin stood up and steadied herself somehow. She took up a letter in a hand not yet quite still.

"Please need me," she said. "Please let me do everything—anything—and never stop. If I never stop in the day time perhaps I shall sleep better at night."

As there came surging in day by day bitter and cruel waves of war news—stories of slaughter by land and sea, of massacre in simple places, of savagery wrought on wounded men and prisoners in a hydrophobia of hate let loose, it was ill lying awake in the dark remembering loved beings surrounded by the worst of all the world has ever known. Robin was afraid to look at the newspapers which her very duties themselves obliged her to familiarise herself with, and she could not close her ears. With battleship raids on harmless coast towns, planned merely to the end of the wanton killing of such unconsidered trifles of humanity as little children and women and men at their every-day work, the circle of horror seemed to draw itself in closely.