Chapter 6

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