"Did Lord Coombe tell you who--he was, Dowie?" "He said perhaps you would tell me yourself--if you felt you'd like me to know. He said it was to be as you chose." Robin fumbled with a thin hand at the neck of her dress. She drew from it a chain with a silk bag attached. Out of the bag she took first a small folded package. "Do you remember the dry leaves I wanted to keep when I was so little?" she whispered woefully. "I was too little to know how to save them. And you made me this tiny silk bag." Dowie's face was almost frightened as she drew back to look. There was in her motherly soul the sudden sense of panic she had felt in the nursery so long ago. "My blessed child!" she breathed. "Not that one--after all that time!" "Yes," said Robin. "Look, Dowie--look." She had taken a locket out of the silk bag and she opened it and Dowie looked. Perhaps any woman would have felt what she felt when she saw the face which seemed to laugh rejoicing into hers, as if Life were such a supernal thing--as if it were literally the blessed gift of God as all the ages have preached to us even while they have railed at the burden of living and called it cruel nothingness. The radiance in the eyes' clearness, the splendid strength and joy in being, could have built themselves into nothing less than such beauty as this. Dowie looked at it in dead silence, her breast heaving fast. "Oh! blessed God!" she broke out with a gasp. "Did they kill--that!" "Yes," said Robin, her voice scarcely more than a breath, "Donal." CHAPTER XXV Dowie put her to bed as she had done when she was a child, feeling as if the days in the nursery had come back again. She saw gradually die out of the white face the unnatural restraint which she had grieved over. It had suggested the look of a girl who was not only desolate but afraid and she wondered how long she had worn it and what she had been most afraid of. In the depths of her comfortable being there lay hidden a maternal pleasure in the nature of her responsibility. She had cared for young mothers before, and that she should be called to watch over Robin, whose child forlornness she had rescued, filled her heart with a glowing. As she moved about the room quietly preparing for the comfort of the night she knew that the soft dark of the lost eyes followed her and that it was not quite so lost as it had looked in the church and on their singularly silent journey. When her work was done and she turned to the bed again Robin's arms were held out to her. "I want to kiss you, Dowie--I want to kiss you," she said with just the yearning dwelling on the one word, which had so moved the good soul long ago with its innocent suggestion of tender reverence for some sacred rite. Dowie hurriedly knelt by the bedside.