But he gently put out his own hand and took in it the slim gloved one and looked down at it, as if it were something quite apart and wonderful—rather as if hands were rare and he had not often seen one before.
There was much sound of heavy traffic on the streets. The lumbering of army motor trucks and vans, the hurry of ever-passing feet and vehicles, changed the familiar old-time London roar, which had been as that of low and distant thunder, into the louder rumbling of a storm which had drawn nearer and was spending its fury within the city's streets themselves. Just at this moment there arose the sound of some gigantic loaded thing, passing with unearthly noises, and high above it pierced the shrilling of fifes.
Robin glanced about the empty garden.
"The noise seems to shut us in. How deserted the Gardens look. I feel as if we were in another world. We are shut in—and shut out," she whispered.
He whispered also. He still looked down at the slim gloved hand as if it had some important connection with the moment.
"We have so few minutes together," he said. "And I have thought of so many things I must say to you. I cannot stop thinking about you. I think of you even when I am obliged to think of something else at the same time. I am in a sort of tumult every moment I am away from you." He stopped suddenly and looked up. "I am speaking as if I had been with you a score of times. I haven't, you know. I have only seen you once since the dance. But it is as if we had met every day—and it's true—I am in a sort of tumult. I think thousands of new things and I feel as if I must tell you of them all."
"I—think too," said Robin. Oh! the dark dew of her imploring eyes! Oh! the beat of the little pulse he could actually see in her soft bare throat. He did not even ask himself what the eyes implored for. They had always looked like that—as if they were asking to be allowed to be happy and to love all kind things on earth.
"One of the new things I cannot help thinking about—it's a queer thing and I must tell you about it. It's not like me and yet it's the strongest feeling I ever had. Since the War has changed everything and everybody, all one's feelings have grown stronger. I never was furious before—and I've been furious. I've felt savage. I've raged. And the thing I'm thinking of is like a kind of obsession. It's this—" he caught her hands again and held her face to face with him. "I—I want to have you to myself," he exclaimed.
She did not try to move. She only gazed at him.
"Nobody else has me—at all," she answered. "No one wants me."
The colour ran up under his fine skin.
"What I mean is a little different. Perhaps you mayn't understand it. I want this—our being together in this way—our understanding and talking—to be something that belongs to us and to no one else. It's too sudden and wonderful for any one but ourselves to understand. Nobody else could understand it. Perhaps we don't ourselves—quite! But I know what it does to me. I can't bear the thought of other people spoiling the beauty of it by talking it over and looking on." He actually got up and began to walk about. "Oh, I ought to have something of my own—before it's all over—I ought! I want this miracle of a thing—for my own."
He stopped and stood before her.
"My mother is the most beloved creature in the world. I have always told her everything. She has always cared. I don't know why I have not told her about—this—but I haven't and I don't want to—now. That is part of the strange thing. I do not want to tell her—even the belovedest woman that ever lived. I want it for myself. Will you let me have it—will you help me to keep it?"
"Like a secret?" said Robin in her soft note.
"No, not a secret. A sort of sacred, heavenly unbelievable thing we own together."
"I understand," was Robin's answer. "It does not seem strange to me. I have thought something like that too—almost exactly like."
It did not once occur to them to express, even to themselves, in any common mental form the fact that they were "in love" with each other. The tide which swept them with it had risen ages before and bore them on its swelling waves as though they were leaves.
"No one but ourselves will know that we meet," she went on further. "I may come and go as I like in these hurried busy hours. Even Lady Kathryn is as free as if she were a shop girl. It is as you said before—there is no time to be curious and ask questions. And even Dowie has been obliged to go to her cousin's widow whose husband has just been killed."
Shaken, thrilled, exalted, Donal sat down again and talked to her. Together they made their plans for meeting, as they had done when Andrews had slackened her guard. There was no guard to keep watch on them now. And the tide rose hour by hour.
CHAPTER VI
Aunts and cousins and more or less able relatives were largely drawn on in these days of stress and need, and Dowie was an efficient person. The cousin whose husband had been killed in Belgium, leaving a young widow and two children scarcely younger and more helpless than herself, had no relation nearer than Dowie, and had sent forth to the good woman a frantic wail for help in her desolation. The two children were, of course, on the point of being added to by an almost immediately impending third, and the mother, being penniless and prostrated, had remembered the comfortable creature with her solid bank account of savings and her good sense and good manners and knowledge of a world larger than the one into which she had been born.
"You're settled here, my lamb," Dowie had said to Robin. "It's more like your own home than the other place was. You're well and safe and busy. I must go to poor Henrietta in Manchester. That's my bit of work, it seems, and thank God I'm able to do it. She was a fine girl in a fine shop, poor Henrietta, and she's not got any backbone and her children are delicate—and another coming. Well, well! I do thank God that you don't need your old Dowie as you did at first."
Thus she went away and in her own pleasant rooms in the big house, now so full of new activities, Robin was as unwatched as if she had been a young gull flying in and out of its nest in a tall cliff rising out of the beating sea.
Her early fever of anxiety never to lose sight of the fact that she was a paid servitor had been gradually assuaged by the delicate adroitness of the Duchess and by the aid of soothing time. While no duty or service was forgotten or neglected, she realised that life was passed in an agreeable freedom which was a happy thing. Certain hours and days were absolutely her own to do what she chose with. She had never asked for such privileges, but the Duchess with an almost imperceptible adjustment had arranged that they should be hers. Sometimes she had taken Dowie away on little holidays to the sea side, often she spent hours in picture galleries or great libraries or museums. In attendance on the Duchess she had learned to know all the wonders and picturesqueness of her London and its environments, and often with Dowie as her companion she wandered about curious and delightful places and, pleased as a child, looked in at her kind at work or play.
While nations shuddered and gasped, cannon belched forth, thunder and flaming, battleships crashed together and sudden death was almost as unintermitting as the ticking of the clock, among the thousands of pairing souls and bodies drawn together in a new world where for the time being all sound was stilled but the throb of pulsing hearts, there moved with the spellbound throng one boy and girl whose dream of being was a thing of entrancement.
Every
