"Then he's been dreaming of her." She almost jerked it out--as if in sudden illumination almost relief. "He's been dreaming of her--! And it may have kept him alive." She paused as if she were asking questions of her own mind. "I wonder," dropped from her in slow speculation, "if she has been dreaming of _him_?" "He was not dead--he was not an angel--he was Donal!" Robin had persisted from the first. He had not been dead. In some incredibly hideous German prison--in the midst of inhuman horrors and the blackness of what must have been despair--he had been alive, and had dreamed as she had. Nurse Jones looked at him, waiting. Even if nurses had not been, presumably, under some such bond of honourable secrecy as constrained the medical profession, he knew she was to be trusted. Her very look told him. "She did dream of him," he said. "She was slipping fast down the slope to death and he caught her back. He saved her life and her child's. She was going to have a child." They were both quite silent for a few moments. The room was still. Then the woman drew her hand with a quick odd gesture across her forehead. "Queer things happened in the last century, but queerer ones are going to happen in this--if people will let them. Doctors and nurses see and think a lot they can't talk about. They're always on the spot at what seems to be the beginning and the ending. These black times have opened up the ways. 'Queer things,' I said," with sudden forcefulness. "They're not queer. It's only laws we haven't known about. It's the writing on the scroll that we couldn't read. We're just learning the alphabet." Then after a minute more of thought, "Those two--were they particularly fond of each other--more to each other than most young couples?" "They loved each other the hour they first met--when they were little children. It was an unnatural shock to them both when they were parted. They seemed to be born mated for life." "That was the reason," she said quite relievedly. "I can understand that. It's as orderly as the stars." Then she added with a sudden, strong, quite normal conviction, and her tiredness seemed to drop from her, "He won't die--that beautiful boy," she said. "He can't. It's not meant. They're going on, those three. He's the most splendid human thing I ever handled--skeleton as he is. His very bones are magnificent as he lies there. And that smile of his that's deep in the blue his eyes are made of--it can only flicker up for a second now--but it can't go out. He's safe, even this minute, though you mayn't believe it." "I do believe it," Coombe said. And he stood there believing it, when she went through the open door and left him. CHAPTER XLI