you the egg and
toast--a nice crisp bit of hot buttered toast."

"Yes," said Robin. "He said he would come again and I know he will."

Dowie bustled about with inward trembling. Whatsoever strange thing had
happened perhaps it had awakened the stunned instinct in the
girl--perhaps some change had begun to take place and she _would_ eat
the bit of food. That would be sane and healthy enough in any case. The
test would be the egg and the crisp toast--the real test. Sometimes a
patient had a moment of uplift and then it died out too quickly to do
good.

But when she had been made ready and the tray was brought Robin ate the
small breakfast without shrinking from it, and the slight colour did not
die away from her cheek. The lost look was in her eyes no more, her
voice had a new tone. The exhaustion of the night before seemed
mysteriously to have disappeared. Her voice was not tired and she
herself was curiously less languid. Dowie could scarcely believe the
evidence of her ears when, in the course of the morning, she suggested
that they should go out together.

"The moor is beautiful to-day," she said. "I want to know it better. It
seems as if I had never really looked at anything."

One of the chief difficulties Dowie often found she was called upon to
brace herself to bear was that in these days she looked so pathetically
like a child. Her small heart-shaped face had always been rather like a
baby's, but in these months of her tragedy, her youngness at times
seemed almost cruel. If she had been ten years old she could scarcely
have presented herself to the mature vision as a more touching thing. It
seemed incredible to Dowie that she should have so much of life and
suffering behind and before her and yet look like that. It was not only
the soft curve and droop of her mouth and the lift of her eyes--there
was added to these something as indescribable as it was heart-moving. It
was the thing before which Donal--boy as he was--had trembled with love
and joy. He had felt its tenderest sacredness when he had knelt before
her in the Wood and kissed her feet, almost afraid of his own voice when
he poured forth his pleading. There were times when Dowie was obliged to
hold herself still for a moment or so lest it should break down her
determined calm.

It was to be faced this morning when Robin came down in her soft felt
hat and short tweed skirt and coat for walking. Dowie saw Mrs. Macaur
staring through a window at her,