ers, as if Life were such a
supernal thing--as if it were literally the blessed gift of God as all
the ages have preached to us even while they have railed at the burden
of living and called it cruel nothingness. The radiance in the eyes'
clearness, the splendid strength and joy in being, could have built
themselves into nothing less than such beauty as this.

Dowie looked at it in dead silence, her breast heaving fast.

"Oh! blessed God!" she broke out with a gasp. "Did they kill--that!"

"Yes," said Robin, her voice scarcely more than a breath, "Donal."

CHAPTER XXV

Dowie put her to bed as she had done when she was a child, feeling as if
the days in the nursery had come back again. She saw gradually die out
of the white face the unnatural restraint which she had grieved over. It
had suggested the look of a girl who was not only desolate but afraid
and she wondered how long she had worn it and what she had been most
afraid of.

In the depths of her comfortable being there lay hidden a maternal
pleasure in the nature of her responsibility. She had cared for young
mothers before, and that she should be called to watch over Robin, whose
child forlornness she had rescued, filled her heart with a glowing. As
she moved about the room quietly preparing for the comfort of the night
she knew that the soft dark of the lost eyes followed her and that it
was not quite so lost as it had looked in the church and on their
singularly silent journey.

When her work was done and she turned to the bed again Robin's arms were
held out to her.

"I want to kiss you, Dowie--I want to kiss you," she said with just the
yearning dwelling on the one word, which had so moved the good soul long
ago with its innocent suggestion of tender reverence for some sacred
rite.

Dowie hurriedly knelt by the bedside.

"Never you be frightened, my lamb--because you're so young and don't
know things," she whispered, holding her as if she were a baby. "Never
you let yourself be frightened for a moment. Your own Dowie's here and
always will be--and Dowie knows all about it."

"Until you took me on your knee to-night," very low and in broken
phrases, "I was so lonely. I was as lonely as I used to be in the old
nursery before you and Mademoiselle came. Afterwards--" with a shudder,
"there were so many long, long nights. There--always--will be so many.
One after every day. I lie in my bed in the dark. And there is
_Nothing_! Oh! Dowie, _let_