t she knew she was going to
hear something else. And this would be the third time.

"I want to show them to Donal." The very perfection of her naturalness
gave Dowie a cold chill, even while she thanked God. She had shivered
inwardly when she had opened the Tower room window, and so she shivered
now despite her serene exterior. A simple unexalted body could not but
think of those fragments which were never even found. And she, standing
there with her lips and eyes smiling, just like any other radiant girl
mother whose young husband is her lover, enraptured and amazed by this
new miracle of hers!

Robin touched her with the tip of her finger.

"It can't be only a dream, Dowie," she said. "He's too real. I am too
real. We are too happy." She hesitated a second. "If he were here at
Darreuch in the daytime--I should not always know where he had been when
he was away. Only his coming back would matter. He can't tell me now
just where he comes from. He says 'Not yet.' But he comes. Every night,
Dowie."

* * * * *

Every day she sewed in the Tower room, her white eyelids drooping over
her work. Each night the basket was carried to her room. And each day
Dowie watched with amazement the hollows in her temples and cheeks and
under her eyes fill out, the small bones cover themselves, the thinned
throat grow round with young tissue and smooth with satin skin. Her hair
became light curled silk again; the faint colour deepened into the
Jacqueminot glow at which passers by had turned to look in the street
when she was little more than a baby. But she never talked of the dream.
The third time was the last for many weeks.

Between Doctor Benton and Dowie there grew up an increased reserve
concerning the dream. Never before had the man encountered an experience
which so absorbed him. He was a student of the advanced order. He also
had seen the books which had fallen into the hands of Coombe--some the
work of scientific men--some the purely commercial outcome of the need
of the hour written by the jackals of the literary profession. He would
have been ready to sit by the bedside of his patient through the night
watching over her sleep, holding her wrist with fingers on her pulse.
Even his most advanced thinking involuntarily harked back to pulse and
temperature and blood pressure. The rapidity of the change taking place
in the girl was abnormal, but it expressed itself physically as well as
mentally.