gns
of the tendency, but it may have lurked secretly within me."

"It caused you to rescue a child from torment and watch over its
helplessness as if it had been your own flesh and blood," interposed the
Duchess.

"It may have been. Who knows? And now the unnatural emotional upheaval
of the times has broken down all my artificialities. I feel old and
tired--perhaps childish. Shrines are being torn down and blown to pieces
all over the world. And I long for a quite simple shrine to cleanse my
soul before. A white little soul hidden away in peace, and sitting
smiling over her sewing of small garments is worth making a pilgrimage
to. Do you remember the childish purity of her eyelids? I want to see
them dropped down as she sews. I want to _see_ her."

"Alixe--and her children--would have been your shrine." The Duchess
thought it out slowly.

"Yes."

He was the last of men to fall into an unconventional posture, but he
dropped forward in his seat, his elbows on his knees, his forehead in
his hands.

"If she lives and the child lives I shall long intolerably to see them.
As her mother seemed to live in Alixe's exquisite body without its soul,
so Alixe's soul seems to possess this child's body. Do I appear to be
talking nonsense? Things without precedent have always been supposed to
be nonsense."

"We are not so sure of that as we used to be," commented the Duchess.

"I shall long to be allowed to be near them," he added. "But I may go
out of existence without seeing them at all. I gave my word."

CHAPTER XXXI

After the first day of cutting out patterns from the models and finely
sewing tiny pieces of lawn together, Dowie saw that, before going to her
bedroom for the night, Robin began to gather together all she had done
and used in doing her work. She had ordered from London one of the
pretty silk-lined lace-frilled baskets women are familiar with, and she
neatly folded and laid her sewing in it. She touched each thing with
fingers that lingered; she smoothed and once or twice patted something.
She made exquisitely orderly little piles. Her down-dropped white lids
quivered with joy as she did it. When she lifted them to look at Dowie
her eyes were like those of a stray young spirit.

"I am going to take them into my room," she said. "I shall take them
every night. I want to keep them on a chair quite near me so that I can
put out my hand and touch them."

"Yes, my lamb," Dowie agreed cheerfully. Bu