"I thought so," Redcliff went on. "She cried out several times, 'Blown to atoms--atoms! Donal!' She was not conscious of the cries." "Are you sure she said 'Donal'?" Coombe asked. "Quite sure. It was that which set me thinking. I have thought a great deal. She has touched me horribly. The mere sight of her was enough. There is desolation in her childlikeness." Lord Coombe sat extremely still. The room was very silent till Redcliff went on in dropped voice. "There was another thing she said. She whispered it brokenly word by word. She did not know that, either. She whispered, 'Now--no one--will ever--know--ever.'" Lord Coombe still sat silent. What he was thinking could not be read in his face but being a man of astute perception and used to the study of faces Dr. Redcliff knew that suddenly some startling thought had leaped within him. "You were right to come to me," he said. "What is it you--suspect?" That Dr. Redcliff was almost unbearably moved was manifest. He was not a man of surface emotions but his face actually twitched and he hastily gulped something down. "She is a heartbreakingly beautiful thing," he said. "She has been left--through sheer kindness--in her own young hands. They were too young--and these are hours of cataclysm. She knows nothing. She does not know that--she will probably have a child." CHAPTER XV The swiftness of the process by which the glowing little Miss Lawless, at whom people had found themselves involuntarily looking so often, changed from a rose of a girl into something strangely like a small waxen image which walked, called forth frequent startled comment. She was glanced at even oftener than ever. "Is she going into galloping consumption? Her little chin has grown quite pointed and her eyes are actually frightening," was an early observation. But girls who are going into galloping consumption cough and look hectic and are weaker day by day and she had no cough, nor was she hectic and, though it was known that Dr. Redcliff saw her frequently, she insisted that she was not ill and begged the Duchess to let her go on with her work. "But the _done-for_ woe in her face is inexplicable--in a girl who has had no love affairs and has not even known any one who could have flirted with her and ridden away. The little thing's _done for_. It cries out aloud. I can't bear to look at her," one woman protested. "I shall send her away if she does not improve," the Duchess said. "She shall go to some remote place in the Highlands and she shall not be allowed to remember that there is a war in the world. If I can manage to send her old nurse Dowie with her she will stand guard over her like an old shepherd."