The Macaurs watched her from afar with their own special order of silent interest. But the sight of the slowly flitting and each day frailer young body began to move them even to the length of low-uttered expression of fear and pity.

"Some days she fair frights me passing by so slow and thin in her bit black dress," Maggy said. "She minds me o' a lost birdie fluttering about wi' a broken wing. She's gey young she is, to be a widow woman—left like that."

The doctor came up the moor road every day and talked more to Dowie than to his patient. As the weeks went by he could not sanely be hopeful. Dowie's brave face seemed to have lost some of its colour at times. She asked eager questions but his answers did not teach her any new thing. Yet he was of a modern school.

"There was a time, Mrs. Dowson," he said, "when a doctor believed—or thought he believed—that healing was carried in bottles. For thinking men that time has passed. I know very little more of such a case as this than you know yourself. You are practical and kind and watchful. You are doing all that can be done. So am I. But I am sorry to say that it seems as if only a sort of miracle—! If—as you said once—she would 'wake up'—there would be an added chance."

"Yes, sir," Dowie answered. "If she would. But it seems as if her mind has stopped thinking about things that are to come. You see it in her face. She can only remember. The days are nothing but dreams to her."

Dowie had written weekly letters to Lord Coombe in accordance with his request. She wrote a good clear hand and her method was as clear as her calligraphy. He invariably gathered from her what he most desired to know and learned that her courageous good sense was plainly to be counted upon. From the first her respectful phrases had not attempted to conceal from him the anxiety she had felt.

"It was the way she looked and that I hadn't expected to see such a change, that took the strength out of me the first time I saw her. And what your lordship had told me. It seemed as if the two things together were too much for her to face. I watch over her day and night though I try to hide from her that I watch so close. If she could be made to eat something, and to sleep, and not to break her little body to pieces with those dreadful fits of crying, there would be something to hold on to. But I shall hold on to her, my lord, whether there is anything to hold on to or not."

He knew she would hold on but as the weeks passed and she faithfully told him what record the days held he saw that in each she felt that she had less and less to grasp. And then came a letter which plainly could not conceal ominous discouragement in the face of symptoms not to be denied—increasing weakness, even more rapid loss of weight, and less sleep and great exhaustion after the convulsions of grief.

"It couldn't go on and not bring on the worst. It is my duty to warn your lordship," the letter ended.

For she had not "wakened up" though somehow Dowie had gone on from day to day wistfully believing that it would be only "Nature" that she should. Dowie had always believed strongly in "Nature." But at last there grew within her mind the fearsome thought that somehow the very look of her charge was the look of a young thing who had done with Nature—and between whom and Nature the link had been broken.

There were beginning to be young lambs on the hillside and Jock Macaur was tending them and their mothers with careful shepherding. Once or twice he brought a newborn and orphaned one home wrapped in his plaid and it was kept warm by the kitchen fire and fed with milk by Maggy to whom motherless lambs were an accustomed care.

There was no lamb in his plaid on the afternoon when he startled Dowie by suddenly appearing at the door of the room where she sat sewing— It was a thing which had never happened before. He had kept as closely to his own part of the place as if there had been no means of egress from the rooms he and Maggy lived in. His face sometimes wore an anxious look when he brought back a half-dead lamb, and now though his plaid was empty his weather-beaten countenance had trouble in it—so much trouble that Dowie left her work quickly.

"I was oot o' the moor and I heard a lamb cryin'," he said uncertainly. "I thought it had lost its mither. It was cryin' pitifu'. I searched an' couldna find it. But the cryin' went on. It was waur than a lamb's cry—It was waur—" he spoke in reluctant jerks. "I followed until I cam' to it. There was a cluster o' young rowans with broom and gorse thick under them. The cryin' was there. It was na a lamb cryin'. It was the young leddy—lyin' twisted on the heather. I daurna speak to her. It was no place for a man body. I cam' awa' to ye, Mistress Dowson. You an' Maggy maun go to her. I'll follow an' help to carry her back, if ye need me."

Dowie's colour left her.

"I thought she was asleep on her bed," she said. "Sometimes she slips away alone and wanders about a bit. But not far and I always follow her. To-day I didn't know."

* * * * *

The sound like a lost lamb's crying had ceased when they reached her. The worst was over but she lay on the heather shut in by the little thicket of gorse and broom—white and with heavily closed lids. She had not wandered far and had plainly crept into the enclosing growth for utter seclusion. Finding it she had lost hold and been overwhelmed. That was all. But as Jock Macaur carried her back to Darreuch, Dowie followed with slow heavy feet and heart. They took her to the Tower room and laid her on her sofa because she had faintly whispered.

"Please let me lie by the window," as they mounted the stone stairs.

"Open it wide," she whispered again when Macaur had left them alone.

"Are you—are you short of breath, my dear?" Dowie asked opening the window very wide indeed.

"No," still in a whisper and with closed eyes. "But—when I am not so tired—I want to—look—"

She was silent for a few moments and Dowie stood by her side and watched her.

"—At the end of the heather," the faint voice ended its sentence after a pause. "I feel as if—something is there." She opened her eyes, "Something—I don't know what. 'Something.' Dowie!" frightened, "Are you—crying?"

Dowie frankly and helplessly took out a handkerchief and sat down beside her. She had never done such a thing before.

"You cry yourself, my lamb," she said. "Let Dowie cry a bit."



CHAPTER XXVII

And the next morning came the "waking up" for which Dowie had so long waited and prayed. But not as Dowie had expected it or in the way she hard thought "Nature."

She had scarcely left her charge during the night though she had pretended that she had slept as usual in an adjoining room. She stole in and out, she sat by the bed and watched the face on the pillow and thanked God that—strangely enough—the child slept. She had not dared to hope that she would sleep, but before midnight she became still and fell into a deep quiet slumber. It seemed deep, for she ceased to stir and it was so quiet that once or twice Dowie became a little anxious and bent over her to look at her closely and listen to her breathing. But, though the small white face was always a touching sight, it was no whiter than usual and her breathing though low and very soft was regular.

"But where the strength's to come from the good God alone knows!" was Dowie's inward sigh.

The clock had just struck one when she leaned forward again. What she saw would not have disturbed her if she had not been overstrung by long anxiety. But now—after the woeful day—in the middle of the night with the echo of the clock's solitary sound still in the solitary room—in the utter stillness of moor and castle emptiness she was startled almost to fright. Something had happened to the pitiful face. A change had come over it—not a change which had stolen gradually but a change which was actually sudden. It was smiling—it had begun to smile that pretty smile which was a very gift of God in itself.

Dowie drew back and put her hand over her mouth. "Oh!" she said "Can she be—going—in her sleep?"

But she was not going. Even Dowie's fright saw that in a few moments more. Was it possible that a mist of colour was stealing over the whiteness—or something near colour? Was the smile deepening and growing brighter? Was that caught breath something almost like a little sob of a laugh—a tiny ghost of a sound more like a laugh than any other sound on earth?

Dowie slid down upon her knees and prayed devoutly—clutching at the robe of pity and holding hard—as women did in crowds nearly two thousand years ago.

"Oh, Lord Jesus," she was breathing behind the hands which hid her face—"if she can dream what makes her smile like that, let her go on, Lord Jesus—let her go on."

When she rose to her chair again and seated herself to watch it almost awed, it did not fade—the smile. It settled into a still radiance and stayed. And, fearful of the self-deception of longing as she was, Dowie could have sworn as the minutes passed that the mist of colour had been real and remained also and even made the whiteness a less deathly thing. And there was such a naturalness in the strange smiling that it radiated actual peace and rest and safety. When the clock struck three and there was no change and still the small face lay happy upon the pillow Dowie at last even felt that she dare steal into her own room and lie down for a short rest. She went very shortly thinking she would return in half an hour at most, but the moment she lay down, her tired eyelids dropped and she slept as she had not slept since her first night at Darreuch Castle.

* * * * *

When she wakened it was not with a start or sense of anxiety even though she found herself sitting up in the broad morning light. She wondered at her own sense of being rested and really not afraid. She told herself that it was all because of the smile she had left on Robin's face and remembered as her own eyes closed.

She got up and stole to the partly opened door of the next room and looked in. All was quite still. Robin herself seemed very still but she was awake. She lay upon her pillow with a long curly plait trailing over one shoulder—and she was smiling as she had smiled in her sleep—softly—wonderfully. "I thank God for that," Dowie thought as she went in.

The next moment her heart was in her throat.

"Dowie," Robin said and she spoke as quietly as Dowie had ever heard her speak in all their life together, "Donal came."

"Did he, my lamb?" said Dowie going to her quickly but trying to speak as naturally herself. "In a dream?"

Robin slowly shook her head.

"I don't think it was a dream. It wasn't like one. I think he was here. God sometimes lets them come—just sometimes—doesn't he? Since the War there have been so many stories about things like that. People used to come to see the Duchess and sit and whisper about them. Lady Maureen Darcy used to go to a place where there was a woman—quite a poor woman—who went into a kind of sleep and gave her messages from her husband who was killed at Liege only a few weeks after they were married. The woman said he was in the room and Lady Maureen was quite sure it was true because he told her true things no one knew but themselves. She said it kept her from going crazy. It made her quite happy."

"I've heard of such things," said Dowie, valiantly determined to keep her voice steady and her expression unalarmed. "Perhaps they are true. Now that the other world is so crowded with those that found themselves there sudden—perhaps they are crowded so close to earth that they try to speak across to the ones that are longing to hear them. It might be. Lie still, my dear, and I'll bring you a cup of good hot milk to drink. Do you think you could eat a new-laid egg and a shred of toast?"

"I will," answered Robin. "I will."

She sat up in bed and the faint colour on her cheeks deepened and spread like a rosy dawn. Dowie saw it and tried not to stare. She must not seem to watch her too fixedly—whatsoever alarming thing was happening.

"I can't tell you all he said to me," she went on softly. "There was too much that only belonged to us. He stayed a long time. I felt his arms holding me. I looked into the blue of his eyes—just as I always did. He was not dead. He was not an angel. He was Donal. He laughed and made me laugh too. He could not tell me now where he was. There was a reason. But he said he could come because we belonged to each other—because we loved each other so. He said beautiful things to me—" She began to speak very slowly as if in careful retrospection. "Some of them were like the things Lord Coombe said. But when Donal said them they seemed to go into my heart and I understood them. He told me things about England—needing new souls and new strong bodies—he loved England. He said beautiful—beautiful things."

Dowie made a magnificent effort to keep her eyes clear and her look straight. It was a soldierly thing to do, for there had leaped into her mind memories of the fears of the great physician who had taken charge of poor young Lady Maureen.

"I am sure he would do that—sure of it," she said without a tremor in her voice. "It's only things like that he's thought of his whole life through. And surely it was love that brought him back to you—both."

She wondered if she was not cautious enough in saying the last word. But her fear was a mistake.

"Yes—both," Robin gave back with a new high bravery. "Both," she repeated. "He will never be dead again. And I shall never be dead. When I could not think, it used to seem as if I must be—perhaps I was beginning to go crazy like poor Lady Maureen. I have come alive."

"Yes, my lamb," answered Dowie with fine courage. "You look it. We'll get you ready for your breakfast now. I will bring you the egg and toast—a nice crisp bit of hot buttered toast."

"Yes," said Robin. "He said he would come again and I know he will."

Dowie bustled about with inward trembling. Whatsoever strange thing had happened perhaps it had awakened the stunned instinct in the girl—perhaps some change had begun to take place and she would eat the bit of food. That would be sane and healthy enough in any case. The test would be the egg and the crisp toast—the real test. Sometimes a patient had a moment of uplift and then it died out too quickly to do good.

But when she had been made ready and the tray was brought Robin ate the small breakfast without shrinking from it, and the slight colour did not die away from her cheek. The lost look was in her eyes no more, her voice had a new tone. The exhaustion of the night before seemed mysteriously to have disappeared. Her voice was not tired and she herself was curiously less languid. Dowie could scarcely believe the evidence of her ears when, in the course of the morning, she suggested that they should go out together.

"The moor is beautiful to-day," she said. "I want to know it better. It seems as if I had never really looked at anything."

One of the chief difficulties Dowie often found she was called upon to brace herself to bear was that in these days she looked so pathetically like a child. Her small heart-shaped face had always been rather like a baby's, but in these months of her tragedy, her youngness at times seemed almost cruel. If she had been ten years old she could scarcely have presented herself to the mature vision as a more touching thing. It seemed incredible to Dowie that she should have so much of life and suffering behind and before her and yet look like that. It was not only the soft curve and droop of her mouth and the lift of her eyes—there was added to these something as indescribable as it was heart-moving. It was the thing before which Donal—boy as he was—had trembled with love and joy. He had felt its tenderest sacredness when he had knelt before her in the Wood and kissed her feet, almost afraid of his own voice when he poured forth his pleading. There were times when Dowie was obliged to hold herself still for a moment or so lest it should break down her determined calm.

It was to be faced this morning when Robin came down in her soft felt hat and short tweed skirt and coat for walking. Dowie saw Mrs. Macaur staring through a window at her, with slightly open mouth, as if suddenly struck with amazement which held in it a touch of shock. Dowie herself was obliged to make an affectionate joke.

"Your short skirts make such a child of you that I feel as if I was taking you out to walk in the park, and I must hold your hand," she said.

Robin glanced down at herself.

"They do make people look young," she agreed. "The Lady Downstairs looked quite like a little girl when she went out in them. But it seems so long since I was little."

* * * * *

She walked with Dowie bravely though they did not go far from the Castle. It happened that they met the doctor driving up the road which twisted in and out among the heath and gorse. For a moment he looked startled but he managed to control himself quickly and left his dogcart to his groom so that he might walk with them. His eyes—at once grave and keen—scarcely left her as he strolled by her side.

When they reached the Castle he took Dowie aside and talked anxiously with her.

"There is a change," he said. "Has anything happened which might have raised her spirits? It looks like that kind of thing. She mustn't do too much. There is always that danger to guard against in a case of sudden mental stimulation."

"She had a dream last night," Dowie began.

"A dream!" he exclaimed disturbedly. "What kind of dream?"

"The dream did it. I saw the change the minute I went to her this morning," Dowie answered. "Last night she looked like a dying thing—after one of her worst breakdowns. This morning she lay there peaceful and smiling and almost rosy. She had dreamed that she saw her husband and talked to him. She believed it wasn't a common dream—that it wasn't a dream at all. She believes he really came to her."

Doctor Benton rubbed his chin and there was serious anxiety in the movement. Lines marked themselves on his forehead.

"I am not sure I like that—not at all sure. In fact I'm sure I don't like it. One can't say what it may lead to. It would be better not to encourage her to dwell on it, Mrs. Dowson."

"The one thing that's in my mind, sir," Dowie's respectfulness actually went to the length of hinting at firmness—"is that it's best not to discourage her about anything just now. It brought a bit of natural colour to her cheeks and it made her eat her breakfast—which she hasn't been able to do before. They must be fed, sir," with the seriousness of experience. "You know that better than I do."

"Yes—yes. They must have food."

"She suggested the going out herself," said Dowie. "I'd thought she'd be too weak and listless to move. And they ought to have exercise."

"They must have exercise," agreed Doctor Benton, but he still rubbed his chin. "Did she seem excited or feverish?"

"No, sir, she didn't. That was the strange thing. It was me that was excited though I kept quiet on the outside. At first it frightened me. I was afraid of—what you're afraid of, sir. It was only her not being excited—and speaking in her own natural voice that helped me to behave as sense told me I ought to. She was happy—that's what she looked and what she was."

She stopped a moment here and looked at the man. Then she decided to go on because she saw chances that he might, to a certain degree, understand.

"When she told me that he was not dead when she saw him, she said that she was not dead any more herself—that she had come alive. If believing it will keep her feeling alive, sir, wouldn't you say it would be a help?"

The Doctor had ceased rubbing his chin but he looked deeply thoughtful. He had several reasons for thoughtfulness in connection with the matter. In the present whirl of strange happenings in a mad war-torn world, circumstances which would once have seemed singular seemed so no longer because nothing was any longer normal. He realised that he had been by no means told all the details surrounding this special case, but he had understood clearly that it was of serious importance that this girlish creature's child should be preserved. He wondered how much more the finely mannered old family nurse knew than he did.

"Her vitality must be kept up— Nothing could be worse than inordinate grief," he said. "We must not lose any advantage. But she must be closely watched."

"I'll watch her, sir," answered Dowie. "And every order you give I'll obey like clockwork. Might I take the liberty of saying that I believe it'll be best if you don't mention the dream to her!"

"Perhaps you are right. On the whole I think you are. It's not wise to pay attention to hallucinations."

He did not mention the dream to Robin, but his visit was longer than usual. After it he drove down the moor thinking of curious things. The agonised tension of the war, he told himself, seemed to be developing new phases—mental, nervous, psychic, as well as physiological. What unreality—or previously unknown reality—were they founded upon? It was curious how much one had begun to hear of telepathy and visions. He himself had been among the many who had discussed the psychopathic condition of Lady Maureen Darcy, whose black melancholia had been dispersed like a cloud after her visits to a little sewing woman who lived over an oil dealer's shop in the Seven Sisters Road. He also was a war tortured man mentally and the torments he must conceal beneath a steady professional calm had loosened old shackles.

"Good God! If there is help of any sort for such horrors of despair let them take it where they find it," he found himself saying aloud to the emptiness of the stretches of heath and bracken. "The old nurse will watch."

* * * * *

Dowie watched faithfully. She did not speak of the dream, but as she went about doing kindly and curiously wise things she never lost sight of any mood or expression of Robin's and they were all changed ones. On the night after she had "come alive" they talked together in the Tower room somewhat as they had talked on the night of their arrival.

A wind was blowing on the moor and making strange sounds as it whirled round the towers and seemed to cry at the narrow windows. By the fire there was drawn a broad low couch heaped with large cushions, and Robin lay upon them looking into the red hollow of coal.

"You told me I had something to think of," she said. "I am thinking now. I shall always be thinking."

"That's right, my dear," Dowie answered her with sane kindliness.

"I will do everything you tell me, Dowie. I will not cry any more and I will eat what you ask me to eat. I will sleep as much as I can and I will walk every day. Then I shall get strong."

"That's the way to look at things. It's a brave way," Dowie answered. "What we want most is strength and good spirits, my dear."

"That was one of the things Donal said," Robin went on quite naturally and simply. "He told me I need not be ill. He said a rose was not ill when a new bud was blooming on it. That was one of the lovely things he told me. There were so many."

"It was a beautiful thing, to be sure," said Dowie.

To her wholly untranscendental mind, long trained by patent facts and duties, any suggestion of the occult was vaguely ominous. She had spent her early years among people who regarded such things with terror. In the stories of her youth those who saw visions usually died or met with calamity. That their visions were, as a rule, gruesome and included pale and ghastly faces and voices hollow with portent was now a supporting recollection. "He was not dead. He was not an angel. He was Donal," Robin had said in her undoubting voice. And she had stood the test—that real test of earthly egg and buttered toast. Dowie was a sensible and experienced creature and had been prepared before the doctor's suggestion to lose no advantage. If the child began to sleep and eat her food, and the fits of crying could be controlled, why should she not be allowed to believe what supported her? When her baby came she'd forget less natural things. Dowie knew how her eyes would look as she bent over it—how they would melt and glow and brood and how her childish mouth would quiver with wonder and love. Who knew but that the Lord himself had sent her that dream to comfort her because she had always been such a loving, lonely little thing with nothing but tender goodness in her whole body and soul? She had never had an untender thought of anybody but for that queer dislike to his lordship— And when you came to think of what had been forced into her innocent mind about him, who wondered?— And she was beginning to see that differently too, in these strange days. She was nothing now but softness and sorrow. It seemed only right that some pity should be shown to her.

Dowie noticed that she did not stay up late that night and that when she went to bed she knelt a long time by her bedside saying her prayers. Oh! What a little girl she looked, Dowie thought,—in her white night gown with her long curly plait hanging down her back tied with a blue ribbon! And she to be the mother of a child—that was no more than one herself!

When all the prayers were ended and Dowie came back to the room to tuck her in, her face was marvellously still-looking and somehow remotely sweet as if she had not quite returned from some place of wonderful calm.

She nestled into the softness of the pillow with her hand under her cheek and her lids dropped quietly at once.

"Good night, Dowie dear," she murmured. "I am going to sleep."

To sleep in a moment or so Dowie saw she went—with the soft suddenness of a baby in its cradle.

But it could not be said that Dowie slept soon. She found herself lying awake listening to the wind whirling and crying round the tower. The sound had something painfully human in it which made her conscious of a shivering inward tremor.

"It sounds as if something—that has been hurt and is cold and lonely wants to get in where things are human and warm," was her troubled thought.

It was a thought so troubled that she could not rest and in spite of her efforts to lie still she turned from side to side listening in an abnormal mood.

"I'm foolish," she whispered. "If I don't get hold of myself I shall lose my senses. I don't feel like myself. Would it be too silly if I got up and opened a tower window?"

She actually got out of her bed quietly and crept to the tower room and opened one. The crying wind rushed in and past her with a soft cold sweep. It was not a bitter wind, only a piteous one.

"It's—it's come in," she said, quaking a little, and went back to her bed.

When she awakened in the morning she realised that she must have fallen asleep as quickly as Robin had, for she remembered nothing after her head had touched the pillow. The wind had ceased and the daylight found her herself again.

"It was silly," she said, "but it did something for me as silliness will sometimes. Walls and shut windows are nothing to them. If he came, he came without my help. But it pacified the foolish part of me."

She went into Robin's room with a sense of holding her breath, but firm in her determination to breathe and speak as a matter of fact woman should.

Robin was standing at her window already dressed in the short skirt and soft hat. She turned and showed that her thin small face was radiant.

"I have been out on the moor. I wakened just after sunrise, and I heard a skylark singing high up in the sky. I went out to listen and say my prayers," she said. "You don't know what the moor is like, Dowie, until you stand out on it at sunrise."

She met Dowie's approach half way and slipped her arms round her neck and kissed her several times. Dowie had for a moment quailed before a thought that she looked too much like a young angel, but her arms held close and her kisses were warm and human.

"Well, well!" Dowie's pats on her shoulder took courage. "That's a good sign—to get up and dress yourself and go into the open air. It would give you an appetite if anything would."

"Perhaps I can eat two eggs this morning," with a pretty laugh. "Wouldn't that be wonderful?" and she took off her hat and laid it aside on the lounge as if she meant to go out again soon.

Dowie tried not to watch her too obviously, but she could scarcely keep her eyes from her. She knew that she must not ask her questions at the risk of "losing an advantage." She had, in fact, never been one of the women who must ask questions. There was however something eerie in remembering her queer feeling about the crying of the wind, silly though she had decided it to be, and something which made it difficult to go about all day knowing nothing but seeing strange signs. She had been more afraid for Robin than she would have admitted even to herself. And when the girl sat down at the table by the window overlooking the moor and ate her breakfast without effort or distaste, it was far from easy to look quite as if she had been doing it every morning.

Then there was the look in her eyes, as if she was either listening to something or remembering it. She went out twice during the day and she carried it with her even when she talked of other things. Dowie saw it specially when she lay down on the big lounge to rest. But she did not lie down often or long at a time. It was as though she was no longer unnaturally tired and languid. She did little things for herself, moving about naturally, and she was pleased when a messenger brought flowers, explaining that his lordship had ordered that they should be sent every other day from the nearest town. She spent an hour filling crystal bowls and clear slim vases with them and the look never left her.

But she said nothing until she went out with Dowie at sunset. They only walked for a short time and they did not keep to the road but went on to the moor itself and walked among the heath and bracken. After a little while they sat down and gave themselves up to the vast silence with here and there the last evening twitter of a bird in it. The note made the stillness greater. The flame of the sky was beyond compare and, after gazing at it for a while, Dowie turned a slow furtive look on Robin.

But Robin was looking at her with clear soft naturalness—loving and untroubled and kindly sweet.

"He came back, Dowie. He came again," she said. And her voice was still as natural as the good woman had ever known it.



CHAPTER XXVIII



But even after this Dowie did not ask questions. She only watched more carefully and waited to be told what the depths of her being most yearned to hear. The gradually founded belief of her careful prosaic life prevented ease of mind or a sense of security. She could not be certain that it would be the part of wisdom to allow herself to feel secure. She did not wish to arouse Doctor Benton's professional anxiety by asking questions about Lady Maureen Darcy, but, by a clever and adroitly gradual system of what was really cross examination which did not involve actual questions, she drew from him the name of the woman who had been Lady Maureen's chief nurse when the worst seemed impending. It was by fortunate chance the name of a woman she had once known well during a case of dangerous illness in an important household. She herself had had charge of the nursery and Nurse Darian had liked her because she had proved prompt and intelligent in an alarming crisis. They had become friends and Dowie knew she might write to her and ask for information and advice. She wrote a careful respectful letter which revealed nothing but that she was anxious about a case she had temporary charge of. She managed to have the letter posted in London and the answer forwarded to her from there. Nurse Darian's reply was generously full for a hard-working woman. It answered questions and was friendly. But the woman's war work had plainly led her to see and reflect upon the opening up of new and singular vistas.

"What we hear oftenest is that the whole world is somehow changing," she ended by saying. "You hear it so often that you get tired. But something is happening—something strange— Even the doctors find themselves facing things medical science does not explain. They don't like it. I sometimes think doctors hate change more than anybody. But the cleverest and biggest ones talk together. It's this looking at a thing lying on a bed alive and talking perhaps, one minute—and gone out the next, that sets you asking yourself questions. In these days a nurse seems to see nothing else day and night. You can't make yourself believe they have gone far— And when you keep hearing stories about them coming back—knocking on tables, writing on queer boards—just any way so that they can get at those they belong to—! Well, I shouldn't be sure myself that a comforting dream means that a girl's mind's giving away. Of course a nurse is obliged to watch—But Lady Maureen found something—And she was going mad and now she is as sane as I am."

Dowie was vaguely supported because the woman was an intelligent person and knew her business thoroughly. Nevertheless one must train one's eyes to observe everything without seeming to do so at all.

Every morning when the weather was fine Robin got up early and went out on the moor to say her prayers and listen to the skylarks singing.

"When I stand and turn my face up to the sky—and watch one going higher into heaven—and singing all the time without stopping," she said, "I feel as if the singing were carrying what I want to say with it. Sometimes he goes so high that you can't see him any more— He's not even a little speck in the highest sky— Then I think perhaps he has gone in and taken my prayer with him. But he always comes back. And perhaps if I could understand he could tell me what the answer is."

She ate her breakfast each day and was sweetly faithful to her promise to Dowie in every detail. Dowie used to think that she was like a child who wanted very much to learn her lesson well and follow every rule.

"I want to be good, Dowie," she said once. "I should like to be very good. I am so grateful."

Doctor Benton driving up the moor road for his daily visits made careful observation of every detail of her case and pondered in secret. The alarming thinness and sharpening of the delicate features was he saw, actually becoming less marked day by day; the transparent hands were less transparent; the movements were no longer languid.

"She spends most of the day out of doors when the weather's decent," Dowie said. "She eats what I give her. And she sleeps."

Doctor Benton asked many questions and the answers given seemed to provide him with food for reflection.

"Has she spoken of having had the dream again?" he inquired at last.

"Yes, sir," was Dowie's brief reply.

"Did she say it was the same dream?"

"She told me her husband had come back. She said nothing more."

"Has she told you that more than once?"

"No, sir. Only once so far."

Doctor Benton looked at the sensible face very hard. He hesitated before he put his next question.

"But you think she has seen him since she spoke to you? You feel that she might speak of it again—at almost any time?"

"She might, sir, and she might not. It may seem like a sacred thing to her. And it's no business of mine to ask her about things she'd perhaps rather not talk about."

"Do you think that she believes that she sees her husband every night?"

"I don't know what I think, sir," said Dowie in honourable distress.

"Well neither do I for that matter," Benton answered brusquely. "Neither do thousands of other people who want to be honest with themselves. Physically the effect of this abnormal fancy is excellent. If this goes on she will end by being in a perfectly normal condition."

"That's what I'm working for, sir," said Dowie.

Whereupon Dr. Benton went away and thought still stranger and deeper things as he drove home over the moor road which twisted through the heather.

* * * * *

The next day's post delivered by Macaur himself brought as it did weekly a package of books and carefully chosen periodicals. Robin had, before this, not been equal even to looking them over and Dowie had arranged them neatly on shelves in the Tower room.

To-day when the package was opened Robin sat down near the table on which they were placed and began to look at them.

Out of the corner of her eye as she arranged books decorously on a shelf Dowie saw the still transparent hand open first one book and then another. At last it paused at a delicately coloured pamphlet. It was the last alluring note of modern advertisement, sent out by a firm which made a specialty of children's outfits and belongings. It came from an elect and expensive shop which prided itself on its dainty presentation of small beings attired in entrancing garments such as might have been designed for fairies and elves.

"If she begins to turn over the pages she'll go on. It'll be just Nature," Dowie yearned.

The awakening she had thought Nature would bring about was not like the perilous miracle she had seen take place and had watched tremulously from hour to hour. Dreams, however much one had to thank God for them, were not exactly "Nature." They were not the blessed healing and strengthening she felt familiar with. You were never sure when they might melt away into space and leave only emptiness behind them.

"But if she would wake up the other way it would be healthy—just healthy and to be depended upon," was her thought. Robin turned over the leaves in no hurried way. She had never carelessly turned over the leaves of her picture books in her nursery. As she had looked at her picture books she looked at this one. There were pages given to the tiniest and most exquisite things of all, and it was the illustrations of these, Dowie's careful sidelong eye saw she had first been attracted by.

"These are for very little—ones?" she said presently.

"Yes. For the new ones," answered Dowie.

There was moment or so of silence.

"How little—how little!" Robin said softly. She rose softly and went to her couch and lay down on it. She was very quiet and Dowie wondered if she were thinking or if she were falling into a doze. She wished she had looked at the pamphlet longer. As the weeks had gone by Dowie had even secretly grieved a little at her seeming unconsciousness of certain tender things. If she had only looked at it a little longer.

* * * * *

"Was there a sound of movement in the next room?"

The thought awakened Dowie in the night. She did not know what the hour was, but she was sure of the sound as soon as she was fully awake. Robin had got up and was crossing the corridor to the Tower room.

"Does she want something? What could she want? I must go to her."

She must never quite lose sight of her or let her be entirely out of hearing. Perhaps she was walking in her sleep. Perhaps the dream— Dowie was a little awed. Was he with her? In obedience to a weird impulse she always opened a window in the Tower room every night before going to bed. She had left it open to-night.

It was still open when she entered the room herself.

There was nothing unusual in the aspect of the place but that Robin was there and it was just midnight. She was not walking in her sleep. She was awake and standing by the table with the pamphlet in her hand.

"I couldn't go to sleep," she said. "I kept thinking of the little things in this book. I kept seeing them."

"That's quite natural," Dowie answered. "Sit down and look at them a bit. That'll satisfy you and you'll sleep easy enough. I must shut the window for you."

She shut the window and moved a book or so as if such things were usually done at midnight. She went about in a quiet matter-of-fact way which was even gentler than her customary gentleness because in these days, while trying to preserve a quite ordinary demeanour, she felt as though she must move as one would move in making sure that one would not startle a bird one loved.

Robin sat and looked at the pictures. When she turned a page and looked at it she turned it again and looked at it with dwelling eyes. Presently she ceased turning pages and sat still with the book open on her lap as if she were thinking not only of what she held but of something else.

When her eyes lifted to meet Dowie's there was a troubled wondering look in them.

"It's so strange—I never seemed to think of it before," the words came slowly. "I forgot because I was always—remembering."

"You'll think now," Dowie answered. "It's only Nature."

"Yes—it's only Nature."

The touch of her hand on the pamphlet was a sort of caress—it was a touch which clung.

"Dowie," timidly. "I want to begin to make some little clothes like these. Do you think I can?"

"Well, my dear," answered Dowie composedly—no less so because it was past midnight and the stillness of moor and deserted castle rooms was like a presence in itself. "I taught you to sew very neatly before you were twelve. You liked to do it and you learned to make beautiful small stitches. And Mademoiselle taught you to do fine embroidery. She'd learned it in a convent herself and I never saw finer work anywhere."

"I did like to do it," said Robin. "I never seemed to get tired of sitting in my little chair in the bay window where the flowers grew, and making tiny stitches."

"You had a gift for it. Not all girls have," said Dowie. "Sometimes when you were embroidering a flower you didn't want to leave it to take your walk."

"I am glad I had a gift," Robin took her up. "You see I want to make these little things with my own hands. I don't want them sent up from London. I don't want them bought. Look at this, Dowie."

Dowie went to her side. Her heart was quickening happily as it beat.

Robin touched a design with her finger.

"I should like to begin by making that," she suggested. "Do you think that if I bought one for a pattern I could copy it?"

Dowie studied it with care.

"Yes," she said. "You could copy it and make as many more as you liked. They need a good many."

"I am glad of that," said Robin. "I should like to make a great many." The slim fingers slid over the page. "I should like to make that one—and that—and that." Her face, bent over the picture, wore its touching young look thrilled with something new. "They are so pretty—they are so pretty," she murmured like a dove.

"They're the prettiest things in the world," Dowie said. "There never was anything prettier."

"It must be wonderful to make them and to know all the time you are putting in the tiny stitches, that they are for something little—and warm—and alive!"

"Those that have done it never forget it," said Dowie. Robin lifted her face, but her hands still held the book with the touch which clung.

"I am beginning to realise what a strange life mine has been," she said. "Don't you think it has, Dowie? I haven't known things. I didn't know what mothers were. I never knew another child until I met Donal in the Gardens. No one had ever kissed me until he did. When I was older I didn't know anything about love and marrying—really. It seemed only something one read about in books until Donal came. You and Mademoiselle made me happy, but I was like a little nun." She paused a moment and then said thoughtfully, "Do you know, Dowie, I have never touched a baby?"

"I never thought of it before," Dowie answered with a slightly caught breath, "but I believe you never have."

The girl leaned forward and her own light breath came a shade more quickly, and the faint colour on her cheek flickered into a sweeter warm tone.

"Are they very soft, Dowie?" she asked—and the asking was actually a wistful thing. "When you hold them do they feel very light—and soft—and warm? When you kiss them isn't it something like kissing a little flower?"

"That's what it is," said Dowie firmly as one who knows. "A baby that's loved and taken care of is just nothing but fine soft lawns and white downiness with the scent of fresh violets under leaves in the rain."

A vaguely dreamy smile touched Robin's face and she bent over the pictures again.

"I felt as if they must be like that though I had never held one," she murmured. "And Donal—told me." She did not say when he had told her but Dowie knew. And unearthly as the thing was, regarded from her standpoint, she was not frightened, because she said mentally to herself, what was happening was downright healthy and no harm could come of it. She felt safe and her mind was at ease even when Robin shut the little book and placed it on the table again.

"I'll go to bed again," she said. "I shall sleep now."

"To be sure you will," Dowie said.

And they went out of the Tower room together, but before she followed her Dowie slipped aside and quietly opened the window.



CHAPTER XXIX



Coombe House had been transformed into one of the most practical nursing homes in London. The celebrated ballroom and picture gallery were filled with cots; a spacious bedroom had become a perfectly equipped operating room; nurses and doctors moved everywhere with quiet swiftness. Things were said to be marvellously well done because Lord Coombe himself held reins which diplomatically guided and restrained amateurishness and emotional infelicities.

He spent most of his time, when he was in the house, in the room on the entrance floor where Mademoiselle had found him when she had come to him in her search for Robin.

He had faced ghastly hours there as the war news struck its hideous variant note from day to day. Every sound which rolled through the street had its meaning for him, and there were few which were not terrible. They all meant inhuman struggle, inhuman suffering, inhuman passions, and wounds or death. He carried an unmoved face and a well-held head through the crowded thoroughfares. The men in the cots in his picture gallery and his ballroom were the better for the outward calm he brought when he sat and talked to them, but he often hid a mad fury in his breast or a heavy and sick fatigue.

Even in London a man saw and heard and was able, if he had an imagination, to visualise too much to remain quite normal. He had seen what was left of strong men brought back from the Front, men who could scarcely longer be counted as really living human beings; he had talked to men on leave who had a hideous hardness in their haggard eyes and who did not know that they gnawed at their lips sometimes as they told the things they had seen. He saw the people going into the churches and chapels. He sometimes went into such places himself and he always found there huddled forms kneeling in the pews, even when no service was being held. Sometimes they were men, sometimes women, and often they writhed and sobbed horribly. He did not know why he went in; his going seemed only part of some surging misery.

He heard weird stories again and again of occult happenings. He had been told all the details of Lady Maureen's case and of a number of other cases somewhat resembling it. He was of those who have advanced through experience to the point where entire disbelief in anything is not easy. This was the more so because almost all previously accepted laws had been shaken as by an earthquake. He had fallen upon a new sort of book drifting about. He had had such books put into his hands by acquaintances, some of whom were of the impressionable hysteric order, but many of whom were as analytically minded as himself. He found much of such literature in the book shops. He began to look over the best written and ended by reading them with deep attention. He was amazed to discover that for many years profoundly scientific men had been seriously investigating and experimenting with mysteries unexplainable by the accepted laws of material science. They had discussed, argued and written grave books upon them. They had been doing all this before any society for psychical research had founded itself and the intention of new logic was to be scientific rather than psychological. They had written books, scattered through the years, on mesmerism, hypnosis, abnormal mental conditions, the powers of suggestion, even unexplored dimensions and in modern days psychotherapeutics.

"What has amazed me is my own ignorance of the prolonged and serious nature of the investigation of an astonishing subject," he said in talking with the Duchess. "To realise that analytical minds have been doing grave work of which one has known nothing is an actual shock to one's pride. I suppose the tendency would have been to pooh-pooh it. The cheap, modern popular form is often fantastic and crude, but there remains the fact that it all contains truths not to be explained by the rules we have always been familiar with."

The Duchess had read the book he had brought her and held it in her hands.

"Perhaps the time has come, in which we are to learn the new ones," she said.

"Perhaps we are being forced to learn them—as a result of our pooh-poohing," was his answer. "Some of us may learn that clear-cut disbelief is at least indiscreet."

Therefore upon a certain morning he sat long in reflection over a letter which had arrived from Dowie. He read it a number of times.

* * * * *

"I don't know what your lordship may think," Dowie said and he felt she held herself with a tight rein. "If I may say so, it's what's going to come out of it that matters and not what any of us think of it. So far it seems as if a miracle had happened. About a week ago she wakened in the morning looking as I'd been afraid she'd never look again. There was actually colour in her thin little face that almost made it look not so thin. There was a light in her eyes that quite startled me. She lay on her bed and smiled like a child that's suddenly put out of pain. She said—quite quiet and natural—that she'd seen her husband. She said he had come and talked to her a long time and that it was not a dream, and he was not an angel—he was himself. At first I was terrified by a dreadful thought that her poor young mind had given way. But she had no fever and she was as sweet and sensible as if she was talking to her Dowie in her own nursery. And, my lord, this is what does matter. She sat up and ate her breakfast and said she would take a walk with me. And walk she did—stronger and better than I'd have believed. She had a cup of tea and a glass of milk and a fresh egg and a slice of hot buttered toast. That's what I hold on to, my lord—without any thinking. I daren't write about it at first because I didn't trust it to last. But she has wakened in the same way every morning since. And she's eaten the bits of nice meals I've put before her. I've been careful not to put her appetite off by giving her more than a little at a time. And she's slept like a baby and walked every day. I believe she thinks she sees Captain Muir every night. I wouldn't ask questions, but she spoke of it once again to me.

"Your obedient servant, SARAH ANN DOWSON."

Lord Coombe sat in interested reflection. He felt curiously uplifted above the rolling sounds in the street and the headlines of the pile of newspapers on the table.

"If it had not been for the tea and egg and buttered toast she would have been sure the poor child was mad." He thought it out. "An egg and a slice of buttered toast guarantee even spiritual things. Why not? We are material creatures who have only material sight and touch and taste to employ as arguments. I suppose that is why tables are tipped, and banjos fly about for beginners. It's because we cannot see other things, and what we cannot see— Oh! fools that we are! The child said he was not an angel—he was himself. Why not? Where did he come from? Personally I believe that he came."



CHAPTER XXX



"It was Lord Coombe who sent the book," said Robin.

She was sitting in the Tower room, watching Dowie open the packages which had come from London. She herself had opened the one which held the models and she was holding a tiny film of lawn and fine embroidery in her hands. Dowie could see that she was quite unconscious that she loosely held it against her breast as if she were nursing it.

"It's his lordship's way to think of things," the discreet answer came impersonally.

Robin looked slowly round the small and really quite wonderful room.

"You know I said that, the first night we came here."

"Yes?" Dowie answered.

Robin turned her eyes upon her. They were no longer hollowed, but they still looked much too large.

"Dowie," she said. "He knows things."

"He always did," said Dowie. "Some do and some don't."

"He knows things—as Donal does. The secret things you can't talk about—the meaning of things."

She went on as if she were remembering bit by bit. "When we were in the Wood in the dark, he said the first thing that made my mind begin to move—almost to think. That was because he knew. Knowing things made him send the book."

The fact was that he knew much of which it was not possible for him to speak, and in passing a shop window he had been fantastically arrested by a mere pair of small sleeves—the garment to which they belonged having by chance so fallen that they seemed to be tiny arms holding themselves out in surrendering appeal. They had held him a moment or so staring and then he had gone into the shop and asked for their catalogue.

"Yes, he knew," Dowie replied.

A letter had been written to London signed by Dowie and the models and patterns had been sent to the village and brought to the castle by Jock Macaur. Later there had come rolls of fine flannel and lawn, with gossamer thread and fairy needles and embroidery floss. Then the sewing began.

Doctor Benton had gradually begun to look forward to his daily visits with an interest stimulated by a curiosity become eager. The most casual looker-on might have seen the change taking place in his patient day by day and he was not a casual looker-on. Was the improvement to be relied upon? Would the mysterious support suddenly fail them?

"What in God's name should we do if it did?" he broke out unconsciously aloud one day when Dowie and he were alone together.

"If it did what, sir?" she asked.

"If it stopped—the dream?"

Dowie understood. By this time she knew that, when he asked questions, took notes and was professionally exact, he had ceased to think of Robin merely as a patient. She had touched him in some unusual way which had drawn him within the circle of her innocent woe. He was under the spell of her pathetic youngness which made Dowie herself feel as if they were watching over a child called upon to bear something it was unnatural for a child to endure.

"It won't stop," she said obstinately, but she lost her ruddy colour because she was not sure.

But after the sewing began there grew up within her a sort of courage. A girl whose material embodiment has melted away until she has worn the aspect of a wraith is not restored to normal bloom in a week. But what Dowie seemed to see was the lamp of life relighted and the first flickering flame strengthening to a glow. The hands which fitted together on the table in the Tower room delicate puzzles in bits of lawn and paper, did not in these days tremble with weakness. Instead of the lost look there had returned to the young doe's eyes the pretty trusting smile. The girl seemed to smile as if to herself nearly all the time, Dowie thought, and often she broke into a happy laugh at her own small blunders—and sometimes only at the sweet littleness of the things she was making.

One fact revealed itself clearly to Dowie, which was that she had lost all sense of the aspect which the dream must wear to others than herself. This was because there had been no others than Dowie who had uttered no suggestion of doubt and had never touched upon the subject unless it had been first broached by Robin herself. She had hidden her bewilderment and anxieties and had outwardly accepted the girl's own acceptance of the situation.

Of the incident of the sewing Lord Coombe had been informed later with other details.

"She sits and sews and sews," wrote Dowie. "She sewed beautifully even before she was out of the nursery. I have never seen a picture of a little saint sewing. If I had, perhaps I should say she looked like it."

Coombe read the letter to his old friend at Eaton Square.

There was a pause as he refolded it. After the silence he added as out of deep thinking, "I wish that I could see her."

"So do I," the Duchess said. "So do I. But if I were to go to her, questioning would begin at once."

"My going to Darreuch would attract no attention. It never did after the first year. But she has not said she wished to see me. I gave my word. I shall never see her again unless she asks me to come. She does not need me. She has Donal."

"What do you believe?" she asked.

"What do you believe?" he replied.

After a moment of speculative gravity came her reply.

"As without proof I believed in the marriage, so without proof I believe that in some mysterious way he comes to her—God be thanked!"

"So do I," said Coombe. "We are living in a changing world and new things are happening. I do not know what they are, but they shake me inwardly."

"You want to see her because—?" the Duchess put it to him.

"Perhaps I am changing with the rest of the world, or it may be that instincts which have always been part of me have been shaken to the surface of my being. Perhaps I was by nature an effusively affectionate and domestic creature. I cannot say that I have ever observed any signs of the tendency, but it may have lurked secretly within me."

"It caused you to rescue a child from torment and watch over its helplessness as if it had been your own flesh and blood," interposed the Duchess.

"It may have been. Who knows? And now the unnatural emotional upheaval of the times has broken down all my artificialities. I feel old and tired—perhaps childish. Shrines are being torn down and blown to pieces all over the world. And I long for a quite simple shrine to cleanse my soul before. A white little soul hidden away in peace, and sitting smiling over her sewing of small garments is worth making a pilgrimage to. Do you remember the childish purity of her eyelids? I want to see them dropped down as she sews. I want to see her."

"Alixe—and her children—would have been your shrine." The Duchess thought it out slowly.

"Yes."

He was the last of men to fall into an unconventional posture, but he dropped forward in his seat, his elbows on his knees, his forehead in his hands.

"If she lives and the child lives I shall long intolerably to see them. As her mother seemed to live in Alixe's exquisite body without its soul, so Alixe's soul seems to possess this child's body. Do I appear to be talking nonsense? Things without precedent have always been supposed to be nonsense."

"We are not so sure of that as we used to be," commented the Duchess.

"I shall long to be allowed to be near them," he added. "But I may go out of existence without seeing them at all. I gave my word."



CHAPTER XXXI



After the first day of cutting out patterns from the models and finely sewing tiny pieces of lawn together, Dowie saw that, before going to her bedroom for the night, Robin began to gather together all she had done and used in doing her work. She had ordered from London one of the pretty silk-lined lace-frilled baskets women are familiar with, and she neatly folded and laid her sewing in it. She touched each thing with fingers that lingered; she smoothed and once or twice patted something. She made exquisitely orderly little piles. Her down-dropped white lids quivered with joy as she did it. When she lifted them to look at Dowie her eyes were like those of a stray young spirit.

"I am going to take them into my room," she said. "I shall take them every night. I want to keep them on a chair quite near me so that I can put out my hand and touch them."

"Yes, my lamb," Dowie agreed cheerfully. But she knew she was going to hear something else. And this would be the third time.

"I want to show them to Donal." The very perfection of her naturalness gave Dowie a cold chill, even while she thanked God. She had shivered inwardly when she had opened the Tower room window, and so she shivered now despite her serene exterior. A simple unexalted body could not but think of those fragments which were never even found. And she, standing there with her lips and eyes smiling, just like any other radiant girl mother whose young husband is her lover, enraptured and amazed by this new miracle of hers!

Robin touched her with the tip of her finger.

"It can't be only a dream, Dowie," she said. "He's too real. I am too real. We are too happy." She hesitated a second. "If he were here at Darreuch in the daytime—I should not always know where he had been when he was away. Only his coming back would matter. He can't tell me now just where he comes from. He says 'Not yet.' But he comes. Every night, Dowie."

* * * * *

Every day she sewed in the Tower room, her white eyelids drooping over her work. Each night the basket was carried to her room. And each day Dowie watched with amazement the hollows in her temples and cheeks and under her eyes fill out, the small bones cover themselves, the thinned throat grow round with young tissue and smooth with satin skin. Her hair became light curled silk again; the faint colour deepened into the Jacqueminot glow at which passers by had turned to look in the street when she was little more than a baby. But she never talked of the dream. The third time was the last for many weeks.

Between Doctor Benton and Dowie there grew up an increased reserve concerning the dream. Never before had the man encountered an experience which so absorbed him. He was a student of the advanced order. He also had seen the books which had fallen into the hands of Coombe—some the work of scientific men—some the purely commercial outcome of the need of the hour written by the jackals of the literary profession. He would have been ready to sit by the bedside of his patient through the night watching over her sleep, holding her wrist with fingers on her pulse. Even his most advanced thinking involuntarily harked back to pulse and temperature and blood pressure. The rapidity of the change taking place in the girl was abnormal, but it expressed itself physically as well as mentally. How closely involved physiology and psychology were after all! Which was which? Where did one end and the other begin? Where was the line drawn? Was there a line at all? He had seen no chances for the apparently almost dying young thing when he first met her. She could not have lived through what lay before her. She had had a dream which she believed was real, and, through the pure joy and comfort of it, the life forces had begun to flow through her being and combine to build actual firm tissue and supply blood cells. The results were physical enough. The inexplicable in this case was that the curative agency was that she believed that her husband, who had been blown to atoms on the battle field, came to her alive each night—talked with her—held her in warm arms. Nothing else had aided her. And there you were—thrown upon occultism and what not!

He became conscious that, though he would have been glad to question Dowie daily and closely, a certain reluctance of mind held him back. Also he realised that, being a primitive though excellent woman, Dowie herself was secretly awed into avoidance of the subject. He believed that she knelt by her bedside each night in actual fear, but faithfully praying that for some months at least the dream might be allowed to go on. Had not he himself involuntarily said,

"She is marvellously well. We have nothing to fear if this continues."

It did continue and her bloom became a thing to marvel at. And not her bloom alone. Her strength increased with her blooming until no one could have felt fear for or doubt of her. She walked upon the moor without fatigue, she even worked in a garden Jock Macaur had laid out for her inside the ruined walls of what had once been the castle's banquet hall. So much of her life had been spent in London that wild moor and sky and the growing of things thrilled her. She ran in and out and to and fro like a little girl. There seemed no limit to the young vigour that appeared day by day to increase rather than diminish.

"It's a wonderful thing and God be thankit," said Mrs. Macaur.

Only Dowie in secret trembled sometimes before the marvel of her. As Doctor Benton had imagined, she prayed forcefully.

"Lord, forgive me if I am a sinner—but for Christ's sake don't take the strange thing away from her until she's got something to hold on to. What would she do— What could she!"

Robin came into the Tower room on a fair morning carrying her pretty basket as she always did. She put it down on its table and went and stood a few minutes at a window looking out. The back of her neck, Dowie realised, was now as slenderly round and velvet white as it had been when she had dressed her hair on the night of the Duchess' dance. Dowie did not know that its loveliness had been poor George's temporary undoing; she only thought of it as a sign of the wonderful change. It had been waxen pallid and had shown piteous hollows.

She turned about and spoke.

"Dowie, dear, I am going to write to Lord Coombe."

Dowie's heart hastened its beat and she herself being conscious of the fact, hastened to answer in an unexcited manner.

"That'll be nice, my dear. His lordship'll be glad to get the good news you can give him."

She asked herself if she would not perhaps tell her something—something which would make the fourth time.

"Perhaps he's asked her to do it," she thought.

But Robin said nothing which could make a fourth time. After she had eaten her breakfast she sat down and wrote a letter. It did not seem a long one and when she had finished it she sent it to the post by Jock Macaur.

* * * * *

There had been dark news both by land and sea that day, and Coombe had been out for many hours. He did not return to Coombe House until late in the evening. He was tired almost beyond endurance, and his fatigue was not merely a thing of muscle and nerve. After he sat down it was some time before he even glanced at the letters upon his writing table.

There were always a great many and usually a number of them were addressed in feminine handwriting. His hospital and other war work brought him numerous letters from women. Even their most impatient masculine opponents found themselves admitting that the women were being amazing.

Coombe was so accustomed to opening such letters that he felt no surprise when he took up an envelope without official lettering upon it, and addressed in a girlish hand. Girls were being as amazing as older women.

But this was not a letter about war work or Red Cross efforts. It was Robin's letter. It was not long and was as simple as a school girl's. She had never been clever—only exquisite and adorable, and never dull or stupid.

"Dear Lord Coombe,

"You were kind enough to say that you would come to see me when I asked you. Please will you come now? I hope I am not asking you to take a long journey when you are engaged in work too important to leave. If I am please pardon me, and I will wait until you are less occupied.

"Robin."

That was all. Coombe sat and gazed at it and read it several times. The thing which had always touched him most in her was her simple obedience to the laws about her. Curiously it had never seemed insipid—only a sort of lovely desire to be in harmony with all near her—things and people alike. It had been an innocent modesty which could not express rebellion. Her lifelong repelling of himself had been her one variation from type. Even that had been quiet except in one demonstration of her babyhood when she had obstinately refused to give him her hand. When Fate's self had sprung upon her with a wild-beast leap she had only lain still and panted like a young fawn in the clutch of a lion. She had only thought of Donal and his child. He remembered the eyes she had lifted to his own when he had put the ring on her finger in the shadow-filled old church—and he had understood that she was thinking of the warm young hand clasp and the glow of eyes she had looked up into when love and youth had stood in his place.

The phrasing of the letter brought it all back. His precision of mind and resolve would have enabled him to go to his grave without having looked on her face again—but he was conscious that she was an integral part of his daily thought and planning and that he longed inexpressibly to see her. He sometimes told himself that she and the child had become a sort of obsession with him. He believed that this was because Alixe had shown the same soft obedience to fate, and the same look in her sorrowful young eyes. Alixe had been then as she was now—but he had not been able to save her. She had died and he was one of the few abnormal male creatures who know utter loneliness to the end of life because of utter loss. He knew such things were not normal. It had seemed that Robin would die, though not as Alixe did. If she lived and he might watch over her, there lay hidden in the back of his mind a vague feeling that it would be rather as though his care of all detail—his power to palliate—to guard—would be near the semblance of the tenderness he would have shown to Alixe. His old habit of mind caused him to call it an obsession, but he admitted he was obsessed.

"I want to see her!" he thought.



CHAPTER XXXII



Many other thoughts filled his mind on his railroad journey to Scotland. He questioned himself as to how deeply he still felt the importance of there coming into the racked world a Head of the House of Coombe, how strongly he was still inspired by the centuries old instinct that a House of Coombe must continue to exist as part of the bulwarks of England. The ancient instinct still had its power, but he was curiously awakening to a slackening of the bonds which caused a man to specialise. It was a reluctant awakening—he himself had no part in the slackening. The upheaval of the whole world had done it and of the world England herself was a huge part—small, huge, obstinate, fighting England. Bereft of her old stately beauties, her picturesque splendours of habit and custom, he could not see a vision of her, and owned himself desolate and homesick. He was tired. So many men and women were tired—worn out with thinking, fearing, holding their heads up while their hearts were lead. When all was said and done, when all was over, what would the new England want—what would she need? And England was only a part. What would the ravaged world need as it lay—quiet at last—in ruins physical, moral and mental? He had no answer. Wiser men than he had no answer. Only time would tell. But the commonest brain cells in the thickest skull could argue to the end which proved that only men and women could do the work to be done. The task would be one for gods, or demigods, or supermen—but there remained so far only men and women to face it—to rebuild, to reinspire with life, to heal unearthly gaping wounds of mind and soul. Each man or woman born strong and given the chance to increase in vigour which would build belief in life and living, in a future, was needed as breath and air are needed—even such an one as in the past would have wielded a sort of unearned sceptre as a Head of the House of Coombe. A man born a blacksmith, if he were of like quality, would meet equally the world's needs, but each would be doing in his way his part of that work which it seemed to-day only demigod and superman could fairly confront.

There was time for much thinking in long hours spent shut in a railroad carriage and his mind was, in these days, not given to letting him rest.

He had talked with many men back from the Front on leave and he had always noted the marvel of both minds and bodies at the relief from strain—from maddening noise, from sights of death and horror, from the needs of decency and common comfort and cleanliness which had become unheard of luxury. London, which to the Londoner seemed caught in the tumult and turmoil of war, was to these men rest and peace.

Coombe felt, when he descended at the small isolated station and stood looking at the climbing moor, that he was like one of those who had left the roar of battle behind and reached utter quiet. London was a world's width away and here the War did not exist. In Flanders and in France it filled the skies with thunders and drenched the soil with blood. But here it was not.

The partly rebuilt ruin of Darreuch rose at last before his view high on the moor as he drove up the winding road. The space and the blue sky above and behind it made it seem the embodiment of remote stillness. Nothing had reached nor could touch it. It did not know that green fields and deep woods were strewn with dead and mangled youth and all it had meant of the world's future. Its crumbled walls and remaining grey towers stood calm in the clear air and birds' nests were hidden safely in their thick ivy.

Robin was there and each night she believed that a dead man came to her a seeming living being. He was not like Dowie, but his realisation of the mystery of this thing touched his nerves as a wild unexplainable sound heard in the darkness at midnight might have done. He wondered if he should see some look which was not quite normal in her eyes and hear some unearthly note in her voice. Physically the effect upon her had been good, but might he not be aware of the presence of some mental sign?

"I think you'll be amazed when you see her, my lord," said Dowie, who met him. "I am myself, every day."

She led him up to the Tower room and when he entered it Robin was sitting by a window sewing with her eyelids dropped as he had pictured them. The truth was that Dowie had not previously announced him because she had wanted him to come upon just this.

Robin rose from her chair and laid her bit of sewing aside. For a moment he almost expected her to make the little curtsey Mademoiselle had taught her to make when older people came into the schoolroom. She looked so exactly as she had looked before life had touched her. There was very little change in her girlish figure; the child curve of her cheek had returned; the Jacqueminot rose glowed on it and her eyes were liquid wonders of trust. She came to him holding out both hands.

"Thank you for coming," she said in her pretty way. "Thank you, Lord Coombe, for coming."

"Thank you, my child, for asking me to come," he answered and he feared that his voice was not wholly steady.

There was no mystic sign to be seen about her. The only mystery was in her absolutely blooming health and naturalness and in the gentle and clear happiness of her voice and eyes. She was not tired; she was not dragged or anxious looking as he had seen even fortunate young wives and mothers at times. There actually flashed back upon him the morning, months ago, when he had met her in the street and said to himself that she was like a lovely child on her birthday with all her gifts about her. Her radiance had been quiet even then because she was always quiet.

She led him to a seat near her window and she sat by him.

"I put this chair here for you because it is so lovely to look out at the moor," she said.

That moved him to begin with. She had been thinking simply and kindly of him even before he came. He had always been prepared for, waited upon either with flattering attentions or ceremonial service, but the quiet pretty things mothers and sisters and wives did had not been part of his life and he had always noticed and liked them and sometimes wondered that most men received them with a casual air. This small thing alone caused the roar he had left behind to recede still farther.

"I was afraid that you might be too busy to come," she went on. "You see, I remembered how important the work was and that there are things which cannot wait for an hour. I could have waited as long as you told me to wait. But I am so glad you could come!"

"I will always come," was his answer. "I have helpers who could be wholly trusted if I died to-night. I have thought of that. One must."

She hesitated a moment and then said, "I am quite away here as you wanted me to be. I see it was the only thing. I read nothing, hear nothing. London—the War—" her voice fell a little.

"They go on. Will you be kind to me and help me to forget them for a while?" He looked through the window at the sky and the moor. "They are not here—they never have been. The men who come back will do anything to make themselves forget for a little while. This place makes me feel that I am a man who has come back."

"I will do anything—everything—you wish me to do," she said eagerly. "Dowie wondered if you would not want to be very quiet and not be reminded. I—wondered too."

"You were both right. I want to feel that I am in another world. This seems like a new planet."

"Would you—" she spoke rather shyly, "would you be able to stay a few days?"

"I can stay a week," he answered. "Thank you, Robin."

"I am so glad," she said. "I am so glad."

So they did not talk about the War or about London, though she inquired about the Duchess and Lady Lothwell and Kathryn.

"Would you like to go out and walk over the moor?" she asked after a short time. "It's so scented and sweet, and darling things scurry about. I don't think they are really frightened, because I try to walk softly. Sometimes there are nests with eggs or soft little things in them."

They went out together and walked side by side, sometimes on the winding road and sometimes through the heather. He found himself watching every step she made and keeping his eye on the path ahead of them to make sure she would avoid roughness or irregularities. In some inner part of his being there remotely worked the thought that this was the way in which he might have walked side by side with Alixe, watching over each step taken by her sacred little feet.

The day was a wonder of peace and relaxation to him. Farther and farther, until lost in nothingness, receded the roar and the tensely strung sense of waiting for news of unbearable things. As they went on he realised that he need not even watch the path before her because she knew it so well and her step was as light and firm as a young roe's. Her very movements seemed to express the natural physical enjoyment of exercise.

He knew nothing of her mind but that Mademoiselle had told him that she was intelligent. They had never talked together and so her mentality was an unexplored field to him. She did not chatter. She said fresh picturesque things about life on the moor, about the faithful silent Macaurs, about Dowie, and now and then about something she had read. She showed him beauties and small curious things she plainly loved. It struck him that the whole trend of her being lay in the direction of being fond of people and things—of loving and being happy,—and even merry if life had been kind to her. Her soft laugh had a naturally merry note. He heard it first when she held him quite still at her side as they watched the frisking of some baby rabbits.

There was a curious relief in realising, as the hours passed, that her old dislike and dread of him had melted into nothingness like a mist blown away in the night. She was thinking of him as if he were some mature and wise friend who had always been kind to her. He need not rigidly watch his words and hers. She was not afraid of him at all; there was no shrinking in her eyes when they met his. If Alixe had had a daughter who was his own, she might have lifted such lovely eyes to him.

They lunched together and Dowie served them with deft ability and an expression which Coombe was able to comprehend the at once watchful and directing meaning of. It directed him to observation of Robin's appetite and watched for his encouraged realisation of it as a supporting fact.

He went to his own rooms in the afternoon that she might be alone and rest. He read an old book for an hour and then talked with the Macaurs about the place and their work and their new charge. He wanted to hear what they were thinking of her.

"It's wonderful, my lord!" was Mrs. Macaur's repeated contribution. "She came here a wee ghost. She frighted me. I couldna see how she could go through what's before her. I lay awake in my bed expectin' Mrs. Dowie to ca' me any hour. An' betwixt one night and anither the change cam. She's a well bairn—for woman she isna, puir wee thing! It's a wonder—a wonder—a wonder, my lord!"

When he saw Dowie alone he asked her a question.

"Does she know that you have told me of the dream?"

"No, my lord. The dream's a thing we don't talk about. She's only mentioned it three times. It's in my mind that she feels it's too sacred to be made common by words."

He had wondered if Robin had been aware of his knowledge. After Dowie's answer he wondered if she would speak to him about the dream herself. Perhaps she would not. It might be that she had asked him to come to Darreuch because her thought of him had so changed that she had realised something of his grave anxiety for her health and a gentle consideration had made her wish to give him the opportunity to see her face to face. Perhaps she had intended only this.

"I want to see her," he had said to himself. The relief of the mere seeing had been curiously great. He had the relief of sinking, as it were, into the deep waters of pure peace on this new planet. In this realisation every look at the child's face, every movement she made, every tone of her voice, aided. Did she know that she soothed him? Did she intend to try to soothe? When they were together she gave him a feeling that she was strangely near and soft and warm. He had felt it on the moor. It was actually as if she wanted to be quieting to him—almost as if she had realised that he had been stretched upon a mental rack with maddening tumult all around him. It was part of her pretty thought of him in the matter of the waiting chair and he felt it very sweet.