In her new black dress, she looked slighter and more immature than he had expected; and the pathetic effect of her appearance was enhanced by the paleness of her face and the heavy, purple shadows that sleeplessness and tears had traced below her eyes. As the impression obtruded itself upon him, his own nervous excitement dropped from him suddenly. "My poor child!" he said involuntarily. At the words and the tone, she turned to him impulsively. "Oh! Mr. Milbanke----" she began. Then her loneliness, her sense of bereavement and desolation, inundated her mind. With a short sob, she moved abruptly away, and turning her face to the wall, broke into a passion of tears. The action was the action of a child; and without hesitation Milbanke responded to it. Stepping across the corridor, he put his arm about her shoulder and drew her gently towards the stairs. "Come!" he said soothingly--"come! The house is quite quiet, and you are badly in want of a little daylight and fresh air. Come! Let me take you out." Clodagh sobbed on; but she suffered herself to be led down the stairs and across the hall towards the open door. There, however, she paused, newly arrested by her grief. "Oh, Mr. Milbanke," she cried, "I can't believe it! I can't believe that we'll never see him again. Poor father! Oh, poor father!" But Milbanke was equal to the situation. "You must be brave," he said kindly. "You must remember that he would like you to be brave." The words were an inspiration; with marvellous efficacy they checked the torrent of Clodagh's tears. For a moment she stood looking at him in a dazed, uncertain way; then she lifted her head in a pathetic attempt at decisive action. "You are right," she said unevenly. "He _would_ like to know that I was brave." The declaration seemed to cost her an immense effort; for instantly it was made, she turned away from Milbanke, freeing herself from his detaining arm. And as though fearing to trust herself to any further onrush of emotion, she stepped through the open door and walked quickly forward to where the gravelled drive merged into the long and narrow glen in which the Orristown woods met the sea. Down the wide track leading to this glen she walked, with head rigidly erect and with resolutely set lips, while Milbanke followed. Now that the immediate need for his protection had been removed, his mind involuntarily reverted to his earlier and more tumultuous thoughts. With a strange, half-timid excitement, he acknowledged the personal element in his surroundings, and exulted with a certain tremulous joy in the keen air that blew inland from the sea; in the pleasant earthy smell of the moss that clothed the rough stones of the boundary wall skirting the path; in the promise of spring, suggested by the hardy green of the wild violet plants clustering at the roots of the beech trees. And with his eyes fixed upon Clodagh's slim black figure, he walked forward in a vaguely intoxicating dream.