oking rested, my lord," she respectfully ventured. "And
you leave us feeling safe."

"Quite safe," he answered; "she is beautifully well."

"That's it, my lord--beautifully--thank God. I've never seen a young
thing bloom as she does and I've seen many."

The cart was at the door and he stood in the shadows of the hall when a
slight sound made him look up at the staircase. It was an ancient
winding stone descent with its feudal hand rope for balustrade. Robin
was coming down it in a loose white dress. Her morning face was
wonderful. It was inevitable that he should ask himself where she had
come from--what she had brought with her unknowing. She looked like a
white blossom drifting from the bough--like a feather from a dove's wing
floating downward to earth. But she was only Robin.

"You awakened," he reproached her.

She came quite near him.

"I wanted to awake. Donal wanted me to."

She had never been quite so near him before. She put out a hand and laid
it on the rough tweed covering his breast.

"I wanted to see you. Will you come again--when you are tired? I shall
always be here waiting."

"Thank you, dear child," he answered. "I will come as often as I can
leave London. This is a new planet."

He was almost as afraid to move as if a bird had alighted near him.

But she was not afraid. Her eyes were clear pools of pure light.

"Before you go away--" she said as simply as she had said it to Dowie
years before, "--may I kiss you, Lord Coombe? I want to kiss you."

His old friend had told him the story of Dowie and it had
extraordinarily touched him though he had said but little. And now it
repeated itself. He had never seen anything so movingly lovely in his
life as her sweet gravity.

She lifted her slight arms and laid them around his neck as she kissed
him gently, as if she had been his daughter--his own daughter and
delight--whose mother might have been Alixe.

CHAPTER XXXV

"It was the strangest experience of my existence. It seemed suddenly to
change me to another type of man."

He said it to the Duchess as he sat with her in her private room at
Eaton Square. He had told her the whole story of his week at Darreuch
and she had listened with an interest at moments almost breathless.

"Do you feel that you shall remain the new type of man, or was it only a
temporary phase?" she inquired.

"I told her that I felt I was living on a new planet. London is the old
planet and I have retu