Chapter 25

Dowie put her to bed as she had done when she was a child, feeling as if
the days in the nursery had come back again. She saw gradually die out
of the white face the unnatural restraint which she had grieved over. It
had suggested the look of a girl who was not only desolate but afraid
and she wondered how long she had worn it and what she had been most
afraid of.

In the depths of her comfortable being there lay hidden a maternal
pleasure in the nature of her responsibility. She had cared for young
mothers before, and that she should be called to watch over Robin, whose
child forlornness she had rescued, filled her heart with a glowing. As
she moved about the room quietly preparing for the comfort of the night
she knew that the soft dark of the lost eyes followed her and that it
was not quite so lost as it had looked in the church and on their
singularly silent journey.

When her work was done and she turned to the bed again Robin's arms were
held out to her.

"I want to kiss you, Dowie--I want to kiss you," she said with just the
yearning dwelling on the one word, which had so moved the good soul long
ago with its innocent suggestion of tender reverence for some sacred
rite.

Dowie hurriedly knelt by the bedside.

"Never you be frightened, my lamb--because you're so young and don't
know things," she whispered, holding her as if she were a baby. "Never
you let yourself be frightened for a moment. Your own Dowie's here and
always will be--and Dowie knows all about it."

"Until you took me on your knee to-night," very low and in broken
phrases, "I was so lonely. I was as lonely as I used to be in the old
nursery before you and Mademoiselle came. Afterwards--" with a shudder,
"there were so many long, long nights. There--always--will be so many.
One after every day. I lie in my bed in the dark. And there is
_Nothing_! Oh! Dowie, _let_ me tell you!" her voice was a sweet longing
wail. "When Donal came back all the world was full and shining and warm!
It was full. There was no loneliness anywhere. We wanted nothing but
each other. And when he was gone there was only emptiness! And I was not
alive and I could not think. I can scarcely think now."

"You'll begin to think soon, my lamb," Dowie whispered. "You've got
something to think of. After a while the emptiness won't be so big and
black."

She ventured it very carefully. Her wise soul knew that the Emptiness
must come first--the awful world-old Emptiness which for an
endless-seeming time nothing can fill-- And all smug preachers of the
claims of life and duty must be chary of approaching those who stand
desolate gazing into it.