The warm, tender breathing, semi-dormant, scarcely sentient-seeming thing might indeed have been the reincarnation of what had in the past so peculiarly reached bodily perfection. Robin, who mysteriously knew every line and curve of the new-born body, could point out how each limb and feature was an embryonic replica. "Though he looks so tiny, he is not really little," was her lovely yearning boast. "He is really very big. Dowie has known hundreds of babies and they were none of them as big as he is. He is a giant--an angel giant," burying her face in the soft red neck. "It seemed to change me into another type of man," Coombe once said to the Duchess. The man into whom he had been transformed was he who lived through the next few days at Darreuch even as though life were a kindly faithful thing. Many other men, he told himself, must have lived as he did and he wondered if any of them ever forgot it. It was a thing set apart. He sat by Robin's side; they talked together; he retired to his own rooms or went out for a long walk, coming back to her to talk again, or read aloud, or to consider with her the marvel of the small thing by her side, examining curled hands and feet with curious interest. "But though they look so little, they are not really," she always said. "See how long his fingers are and how they taper. And his foot is long, too, and narrow and arched. Donal's was like it." "Was," she said, and he wondered if she might not feel a pang as he himself did. He wondered often and sometimes, when he sat alone in his room at night, found something more than wonder in his mind--something that, if she had not forbidden it, would have been fear because of strange things he saw in her. He could not question her. He dared not even remotely touch on the dream. She was so well, her child was so well. She was as any young mother might have been who could be serene in her husband's absence because she knew he was safe and would soon return. "Is she always as calm?" he once asked Dowie. "Does she never seem to be reminded of what would have been if he were alive?" Dowie shook her head and he saw that the old anxiousness came back upon her. "My lord, she believes he _is_ alive when she sees him. That's what troubles me even in my thankfulness. I don't understand, God help me! I was afraid when she saw the child that it might all come over her again in a way that would do her awful harm. But when I laid the little thing down by her she just lay there herself and looked at it as if something was uplifting her. And in a few seconds she whispered, 'He is like Donal.' And then she said to herself, soft but quite clear, 'Donal, Donal!' And never a tear rose. Perhaps," hesitating over it, "it's the blessedness of _time_. A child's a wonderful thing--and so is time. Sometimes," a queer sigh broke from her, "when I've been hard put to it by trouble, I've said to myself, 'Well the Almighty did give us _time_--whatever else he takes away.'"