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