"If I had been able to express the something which approached affection which I felt for Donal, he would have found out that my limitations were not deliberately evil proclivities," was one of the things he said. "One day he would have ended by making a clean breast of it. He was afraid of me. I suspect he was afraid of his mother--fond as they were of each other. I should have taken the matter in hand and married the pair of them at once--quietly if they preferred it, but safely and sanely. God knows I should have comprehended their wish to keep a roaring world out of their paradise. It _was_ paradise!" "How you believe her!" she exclaimed. "She is not a trivial thing, neither was he. If I did _not_ believe her I should know that he _meant_ to marry her, even if fate played them some ghastly trick and there was not time. Another girl's consciousness of herself might have saved her, but she had no consciousness but his. If--if a son is born he should be what his father would have been after my death." "The Head of the House," the Duchess said. "It is a curious thing," he deliberated, "that now there remains no possible head but what is left of myself--it ceases to seem the mere pompous phrase one laughed at--the Head of the House of Coombe. Here I, of all men, sit before you glaring into the empty future and demanding one. There ought to have been more males in the family. Only four were killed--and we are done for." "If you had seen them married before he went away--" she began. He rose to his feet as if involuntarily. He looked as she had never seen him look before. "Allow me to make a fantastic confession to you," he said. "It will open doors. If all were as the law foolishly demands it should be--if she were safe in the ordinary way--absurdly incredible or not as the statement may seem--I should now be at her feet." "At her feet!" she said slowly, because she felt herself facing actual revelation. "Her child would be to me the child of the son who ought to have been born to me a life time ago. God, how I have wanted him! Robin would seem to be what another Madonna-like young creature might have been if she had been my wife. She would not know that she was a little saint on an altar. She would be the shrine of the past and the future. In my inexpressive way I should be worshipping before her. That her possible son would rescue the House of Coombe from extinction would have meant much, but it would be a mere detail. Now you understand." Yes. She understood. Things she had never comprehended and had not expected to comprehend explained themselves with comparative clearness. He proceeded with a certain hard distinctness.