alone. We are sending her away with you because you love
her and will know how to take care of her. We are very anxious."

"Your grace," Dowie faltered and one of the tears she had forced back
when she was in the railway carriage rose insubordinately and rolled
down her cheek, "just once I nursed a young lady who--looked as she does
now. I did my best with all my heart, the doctors did their best,
everybody that loved her did their best--and there were a good many. We
watched over her for six months."

"Six months?" the Duchess' voice was an unsteady thing.

"At the end of six months we laid her away in a pretty country
churchyard, with flowers heaped all over her--and her white little hands
full of them. And she hadn't--as much to contend with--as Miss Robin
has."

And in the minute of dead silence which followed more tears fell. No one
tried to hold them back and some of them were the tears of the old
Duchess.

CHAPTER XXIII

There are old and forgotten churches in overgrown corners of London
whose neglected remoteness suggests the possibility of any
ecclesiastical ceremony being performed quite unobserved except by the
parties concerned in it. If entries and departures were discreetly
arranged, a baptismal or a marriage ceremony might take place almost as
in a tomb. A dark wet day in which few pass by and such as pass are
absorbed in their own discomforts beneath their umbrellas, offers a
curiously entire aloofness of seclusion. In the neglected graveyards
about them there is no longer any room to bury any one in the damp black
earth where the ancient tombs are dark with mossy growth and mould,
heavy broken slabs slant sidewise perilously, sad and thin cats prowl,
and from a soot-blackened tree or so the rain drops with hollow,
plashing sounds.

The rain was so plashing and streaming in rivulets among the mounds and
stones of the burial ground of one of the most ancient and forgotten
looking of such churches, when on a certain afternoon there came to the
narrow soot-darkened Vicarage attached to it a tall, elderly man who
wished to see and talk to the Vicar.

The Vicar in question was an old clergyman who had spent nearly fifty
years in the silent, ecclesiastical-atmosphered small house. He was an
unmarried man whose few relatives living in the far North of England
were too poor and unenterprising to travel to London. His days were
spent in unsatisfactory work among crowded and poverty-stricken hum