aged in work too important to leave. If I am
please pardon me, and I will wait until you are less occupied.

"Robin."

That was all. Coombe sat and gazed at it and read it several times. The
thing which had always touched him most in her was her simple obedience
to the laws about her. Curiously it had never seemed insipid--only a
sort of lovely desire to be in harmony with all near her--things and
people alike. It had been an innocent modesty which could not express
rebellion. Her lifelong repelling of himself had been her one variation
from type. Even that had been quiet except in one demonstration of her
babyhood when she had obstinately refused to give him her hand. When
Fate's self had sprung upon her with a wild-beast leap she had only lain
still and panted like a young fawn in the clutch of a lion. She had only
thought of Donal and his child. He remembered the eyes she had lifted to
his own when he had put the ring on her finger in the shadow-filled old
church--and he had understood that she was thinking of the warm young
hand clasp and the glow of eyes she had looked up into when love and
youth had stood in his place.

The phrasing of the letter brought it all back. His precision of mind
and resolve would have enabled him to go to his grave without having
looked on her face again--but he was conscious that she was an integral
part of his daily thought and planning and that he longed inexpressibly
to see her. He sometimes told himself that she and the child had become
a sort of obsession with him. He believed that this was because Alixe
had shown the same soft obedience to fate, and the same look in her
sorrowful young eyes. Alixe had been then as she was now--but he had not
been able to save her. She had died and he was one of the few abnormal
male creatures who know utter loneliness to the end of life because of
utter loss. He knew such things were not normal. It had seemed that
Robin would die, though not as Alixe did. If she lived and he might
watch over her, there lay hidden in the back of his mind a vague feeling
that it would be rather as though his care of all detail--his power to
palliate--to guard--would be near the semblance of the tenderness he
would have shown to Alixe. His old habit of mind caused him to call it
an obsession, but he admitted he was obsessed.

"I want to _see_ her!" he thought.

CHAPTER XXXII

Many other thoughts filled his mind on his railroad journey to Scotland.
He