Chapter 13 - Page 2

eagerness; each smallest detail was the sacred thing. She begged the
Duchess to allow her to visit and help the mothers of sons who were
fighting--or wounded or missing. That made her feel nearer to things she
wanted to feel near to. When they cried or told her stories, she could
understand. When she worked she might be doing things which might
somehow reach Donal or boys like Donal.

Howsoever long her life was she knew one thing would never be blotted
out by time--the day she went down to Mersham Wood to see Mrs. Bennett,
whose three grandsons had been killed within a few days of each other.
She had received the news in one telegram. There was no fairy wood any
longer, there were only bare branched trees standing holding out naked
arms to the greyness of the world. They looked as if they were
protesting against something. The grass and ferns were brown and sodden
with late rains and there were no hollyhocks and snapdragons in the
cottage garden--only on either side of the brick path dead brown stalks,
some of them broken by the wind. Things had not been neatly cut down and
burned and swept away. The grandsons had made the garden autumn-tidy
every year before this one.

The old fairy woman sat on a clean print-covered arm chair by a very
small fire. She had a black print dress on and a black shawl and a black
ribbon round her cap. Her Bible lay on a little table near her but it
was closed.

"Don't get up, please, Mrs. Bennett," Robin said when she lifted the
latch and entered.

The old fairy woman looked at her in a dazed way.

"I'm so eye-dimmed with crying that I can scarcely see," she said.

Robin came to her and knelt down on the hearth.

"I'm your lodger," she faltered, "who--who used to love the fairy wood
so."

She had not known what she would say when she spoke first but she had
certainly not thought of saying anything like this. And she certainly
had not known that she would suddenly find herself overwhelmed by a
rising tidal wave of unbearable woe and drop her face on to the old
woman's lap with wild sobbing. She had not come down from London to do
this--but away from the world--in the clean, still little cottage room
which seemed to hold only grief and silence and death the wave rose and
broke and swept her with it.

Mrs. Bennett only gave herself up to the small clutching hands and sat
and shivered.

"No one--will come in--will they?" Robin was gasping. "There is no one
to hear, is there?"

"No one on earth," said the old fairy woman. "Quiet and loneliness are
left if there's naught else."

What she thought it would be hard to say. The blow which