e went back to Coombe House and when he crossed the threshold he
confronted the elderly unliveried man who had stood at his place for
years--and the usually unperturbed face was agitated so nearly to panic
that he stopped and addressed him.

"Has anything happened?"

"My lord--a Red Cross nurse--has brought"--he was actually quite
unsteady--too unsteady to finish, for the next moment the Red Cross
nurse was at his side--looking very whitely fresh and clean and with a
nice, serious youngish face.

"I need not prepare you for good news--even if it is a sort of shock,"
she said, watching him closely. "I have brought Captain Muir back to
you."

"You have brought--?" he exclaimed.

"He has been in one of the worst German prisons. He was left for dead on
the field and taken prisoner. We must not ask him questions. I don't
know why he is alive. He escaped, God knows how. At this time he does
not know himself. I saw him on the boat. He asked me to take charge of
him," she spoke very quickly. "He is a skeleton, poor boy. Come."

She led the way to his own private room. She went on talking short
hurried sentences, but he scarcely heard her. This, then, was what he
had been waiting for. Why had he not known? This tremendous thing was
really not so tremendous after all because it had happened in other
cases before-- Yet he had never once thought of it.

"He would not let his wife or his mother see him until he looked more
like himself," he heard the Red Cross nurse say as he entered the room.

Donal was lying stretched at full length on a sofa. He looked abnormally
long, because he was so thin that he was, as the nurse had said, a
skeleton. His face was almost a death's head, but his blue eyes looked
out of their great hollow sockets clear as tarn water, and with the
smile which Coombe would not have forgotten howsoever long life had
dragged out.

"Be very careful!" whispered the nurse.

He knew he must be careful. Only the eyes were alive. The body was a
collapsed thing. He seemed scarcely breathing, his voice was a thread.

"Robin!" Coombe caught as he bent close to him. "Robin!"

"She is well, dear boy!" How his voice shook! "I have taken care of
her."

The light leaped up into the blue for a second. The next the lids
dropped and the nurse sprang forward because he had slipped into a faint
so much like death that it might well have rent hope from a looker-on.

For the next hour, and indeed for many following, th