his fever. Jackson was a fellow prisoner who died of
hemorrhage brought on by brutality. Often I couldn't understand him, but
he kept bringing in the name of Jackson. One thing puzzled me very much.
He said several times 'Jackson taught me to dream of Robin. I should
never have seen Robin if I hadn't known Jackson.' Now 'Robin' is a boy's
name--but he said 'her' and 'she' two or three times as if it were a
girl's."

"Robin is his wife," said Coombe. He really found the support of the
door he still held open, useful for the moment.

An odd new interest sharpened in her eyes.

"Then he's been dreaming of her." She almost jerked it out--as if in
sudden illumination almost relief. "He's been dreaming of her--! And it
may have kept him alive." She paused as if she were asking questions of
her own mind. "I wonder," dropped from her in slow speculation, "if she
has been dreaming of _him_?"

"He was not dead--he was not an angel--he was Donal!" Robin had
persisted from the first. He had not been dead. In some incredibly
hideous German prison--in the midst of inhuman horrors and the blackness
of what must have been despair--he had been alive, and had dreamed as
she had.

Nurse Jones looked at him, waiting. Even if nurses had not been,
presumably, under some such bond of honourable secrecy as constrained
the medical profession, he knew she was to be trusted. Her very look
told him.

"She did dream of him," he said. "She was slipping fast down the slope
to death and he caught her back. He saved her life and her child's. She
was going to have a child."

They were both quite silent for a few moments. The room was still. Then
the woman drew her hand with a quick odd gesture across her forehead.

"Queer things happened in the last century, but queerer ones are going
to happen in this--if people will let them. Doctors and nurses see and
think a lot they can't talk about. They're always on the spot at what
seems to be the beginning and the ending. These black times have opened
up the ways. 'Queer things,' I said," with sudden forcefulness. "They're
not queer. It's only laws we haven't known about. It's the writing on
the scroll that we couldn't read. We're just learning the alphabet."
Then after a minute more of thought, "Those two--were they particularly
fond of each other--more to each other than most young couples?"

"They loved each other the hour they first met--when they were little
children. It was an unnatural shock