ever had
been.

"I brought it with me," he said and took her close in his arms. For a
few minutes the wood seemed more still than before.

"Do you hear my heart beat?" he said at last.

"I feel it. Do you hear mine?" she whispered.

"We love each other so!" he breathed. "We love each other so!"

"Yes," she answered. "Yes."

Did every one who saw him know how beautiful he was? Oh his smile that
loved her so and made her feel there was no fear or loneliness left on
earth! He was so tall and straight and strong--a young soldier statue!
When he laughed her heart always gave a strange little leap. It was such
a lovely sound. His very hands were beautiful--with long, strong smooth
fingers and smooth firm palms. Oh! Donal! Donal! And while she smiled as
a little angel might smile, small sobs of joy filled her throat.

They sat together among the ferns, close side by side. He showed her the
thing he had brought with him. It was a very slender chain of gold with
a plain gold ring hung on it. He put the chain around her neck but
slipped the ring on her finger and kissed it again and again.

"Wear it when we are together," he whispered. "I want to see it. It
makes you mine as much as if I had put it on in a church with a huge
organ playing."

"I should be yours without it," answered Robin. "I _am_ yours."

"Yes," he whispered again. "You are mine. And I am yours. It always was
so--since the morning stars sang together."

CHAPTER XI

"There are more women than those in Belgium who are being swept over by
the chariots of war and trampled on by marching feet," the Duchess of
Darte said to a group of her women friends on a certain afternoon.

The group had met to work and some one had touched on a woeful little
servant-maid drama which had painfully disclosed itself in her
household. A small, plain kitchen maid had "walked out" in triumphant
ecstasy with a soldier who, a few weeks after bidding her good-bye, had
been killed in Belgium. She had been brought home to her employer's
house by a policeman who had dragged her out of the Serpentine. An old
story had become a modern one. In her childish ignorance and terror of
her plight she had seen no other way, but she had not had courage to
face more than very shallow water, with the result of finding herself
merely sticking in the mud and wailing aloud.

"The policeman was a kind-hearted, sensible fellow," said the relator of
the incident. "He had a family of hi