There was seldom much leisure in their meetings. Sometimes they had only a few minutes in which to exchange a word or so, to cling to each other's hands. But even in these brief meetings the words that were said were food for new life and dreams when they were apart. And the tide rose. But it did not overflow until one early morning when they met in a gorse-filled hollow at Hampstead, each looking at the other pale and stricken. In Robin's wide eyes was helpless horror and Donal knew too well what she was going to say. "Lord Halwyn is killed!" she gasped out. "And four of his friends! We all danced the tango together--and that new kicking step!" She began to sob piteously. Somehow it was the sudden memory of the almost comic kicking step which overwhelmed her with the most gruesome sense of awfulness--as if the world had come to an end. "It was new--and they laughed so! They are killed!" she cried beating her little hands. He had just heard the same news. Five of them! And he had heard details she had been spared. He was as pale as she. He stood before her quivering, hot and cold. Until this hour they had been living only through the early growing wonder of their dream; they had only talked together and exquisitely yearned and thrilled at the marvel of every simple word or hand-touch or glance, and every meeting had been a new delight. But now suddenly the being of each shook and called to the other in wild need of the nearer nearness which is comfort and help. It was early--early morning--the heath spread about them wide and empty, and at that very instant a skylark sprang from its hidden nest in the earth and circled upward to heaven singing as to God. "They will take _you_!" she wailed. "_You--you!_" And did not know that she held out her arms. But he knew--with a great shock of incredible rapture and tempestuous answering. He caught her softness to his thudding young chest and kissed her sobbing mouth, her eyes, her hair, her little pulsing throat. "Oh, little love," he himself almost sobbed the words. "Oh, little lovely love!" She melted into his arms like a weeping child. It was as if she had always rested there and it was mere Nature that he should hold and comfort her. But he had never heard or dreamed of the possibility of such anguish as was in her sobbing. "They will take you!" she said. "And--you danced too. And I must not hold you back! And I must stay here and wait and wait--and _wait_--until some day--! Donal! Donal!" He sat down with her amongst the gorse and held her on his knee as if she had been six years old. She did not attempt to move but crouched there and clung to him with both hands. She remembered only one thing--that he must go! And there were cannons--and shells singing and screaming! And boys like George in awful heaps. No laughing face as it had once looked--all marred and strange and piteously lonely as they lay.