It did not once occur to them to express, even to themselves, in any common mental form the fact that they were "in love" with each other. The tide which swept them with it had risen ages before and bore them on its swelling waves as though they were leaves. "No one but ourselves will know that we meet," she went on further. "I may come and go as I like in these hurried busy hours. Even Lady Kathryn is as free as if she were a shop girl. It is as you said before--there is no time to be curious and ask questions. And even Dowie has been obliged to go to her cousin's widow whose husband has just been killed." Shaken, thrilled, exalted, Donal sat down again and talked to her. Together they made their plans for meeting, as they had done when Andrews had slackened her guard. There was no guard to keep watch on them now. And the tide rose hour by hour. CHAPTER VI Aunts and cousins and more or less able relatives were largely drawn on in these days of stress and need, and Dowie was an efficient person. The cousin whose husband had been killed in Belgium, leaving a young widow and two children scarcely younger and more helpless than herself, had no relation nearer than Dowie, and had sent forth to the good woman a frantic wail for help in her desolation. The two children were, of course, on the point of being added to by an almost immediately impending third, and the mother, being penniless and prostrated, had remembered the comfortable creature with her solid bank account of savings and her good sense and good manners and knowledge of a world larger than the one into which she had been born. "You're settled here, my lamb," Dowie had said to Robin. "It's more like your own home than the other place was. You're well and safe and busy. I must go to poor Henrietta in Manchester. That's my bit of work, it seems, and thank God I'm able to do it. She was a fine girl in a fine shop, poor Henrietta, and she's not got any backbone and her children are delicate--and another coming. Well, well! I do thank God that you don't need your old Dowie as you did at first." Thus she went away and in her own pleasant rooms in the big house, now so full of new activities, Robin was as unwatched as if she had been a young gull flying in and out of its nest in a tall cliff rising out of the beating sea.