In one of the older London squares there was a house upon the broad doorsteps of which Lord Coombe stood oftener than upon any other. The old Dowager Duchess of Darte, having surrounded herself with almost royal dignity, occupied that house in an enforced seclusion. She was a confirmed rheumatic invalid, but her soul was as strong as it was many years before, when she had given its support to Coombe in his unbearable hours. She had poured out her strength in silence, and in silence he had received it. She saved him from slipping over the verge of madness. But there came a day when he spoke to her of this--of the one woman he had loved, Princess Alixe of X----: "There was never a human thing so transparently pure, and she was the possession of a brute incarnate. She shook with terror before him. He killed her." "I believe he did," she said, unsteadily. "He was not received here at Court afterward." "He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck her a blow. I saw that. I was in attendance on him at Windsor." "When I first knew you," the Duchess said gravely. "There was a night--I was young--young--when I found myself face to face with her in the stillness of the wood. I went quite mad for a time. I threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed. She knelt and prayed for her own soul as well as mine. I kissed the hem of her dress and left her standing--alone." After a silence he added: "It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died." The Duchess knew what else had died: the high adventure of youth and joy of life in him. On a table beside her winged chair were photographs of two women, who, while obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart, were in face and form so singularly alike that they might have been the same person. One was the Princess Alixe of X---- and the other--Feather. "The devil of chance," Coombe said, "sometimes chooses to play tricks. Such a trick was played on me." It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange questioning gaze upon. "When I saw this," he said, "this--exquisitely smiling at me in a sunny garden--the tomb opened under my feet and I stood on the brink of it--twenty-five again." He made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have ironically disbelieved. He ended with the story of Robin. "I am determined," he explained, "to stand between the child and what would be inevitable. Her frenzy of desire to support herself arises from her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathise with her entirely." "Mademoiselle Valle is an intelligent woman," the Duchess said. "Send her to me; I shall talk to her. Then she can bring the child." And so it was arranged that Robin should be taken into the house in the old fashioned square to do for the Duchess what a young relative might have done. And, a competent person being needed to take charge of the linen, "Dowie" would go to live under the same roof.