r was it necessary."

But he began to listen with special attention. There awakened in his
mind the consciousness that he was being asked questions which suggested
an object. The next one added to his awakening sense of the thing.

"Her exercise and holidays were always taken alone?" Redcliff said.

"The Duchess believed so."

"She has evidently been living under a poignant strain and some ghastly
shock has struck her down. I think she must have been in the room when
you brought the news of young Muir's terrible death."

"She was," said Coombe. "I saw her and then forgot."

"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 ga