Chapter 15

The swiftness of the process by which the glowing little Miss Lawless,
at whom people had found themselves involuntarily looking so often,
changed from a rose of a girl into something strangely like a small
waxen image which walked, called forth frequent startled comment. She
was glanced at even oftener than ever.

"Is she going into galloping consumption? Her little chin has grown
quite pointed and her eyes are actually frightening," was an early
observation. But girls who are going into galloping consumption cough
and look hectic and are weaker day by day and she had no cough, nor was
she hectic and, though it was known that Dr. Redcliff saw her
frequently, she insisted that she was not ill and begged the Duchess to
let her go on with her work.

"But the _done-for_ woe in her face is inexplicable--in a girl who has
had no love affairs and has not even known any one who could have
flirted with her and ridden away. The little thing's _done for_. It
cries out aloud. I can't bear to look at her," one woman protested.

"I shall send her away if she does not improve," the Duchess said. "She
shall go to some remote place in the Highlands and she shall not be
allowed to remember that there is a war in the world. If I can manage to
send her old nurse Dowie with her she will stand guard over her like an
old shepherd."

She also had been struck by the look which had been spoken of as
"done-for." Girls did not look like that for any common reason. She
asked herself questions and with great care sat on foot a gradual and
delicate cross-examination of Robin herself. But she discovered no
reason common or uncommon for the thing she recognised each time she
looked at her. It was inevitable that she should talk to Lord Coombe but
she met in him a sort of barrier. She could not avoid seeing that he was
preoccupied. She remotely felt that he was turning over in his mind
something which precluded the possibility of his giving attention to
other questions.

"I almost feel as if your interest in her had lapsed," she said at last.

"No. It has taken a--an entirely new form," was his answer.

It was when his glance encountered hers after he said this that each
regarded the other with a slow growing anxiousness. Something came to
life in each pair of eyes and it was something disturbed and reluctant.
The Duchess spoke first.

"She has had no companions," she said painfully. "The War put an end to
what I thought I might do for her. There has been _nobody_."

"At present it is a curious fact that in one sense we know very little
of each other's lives," he answered. "The old leisurely habit of