Chapter 26 - Page 2

the time when it would be "all over."

A patient who held to such thoughts as her hidden comfort did not give
herself much chance.

Sometimes she lay for long hours on the sofa by the open window but
sometimes a restlessness came upon her and she wandered about the empty
rooms of the little castle as though she were vaguely searching for
something which was not there. Dowie furtively followed her at a
distance knowing that she wanted to be alone. The wide stretches of the
moor seemed to draw her. At times she stood gazing at them out of a
window, sometimes she sat in a deep window seat with her hands lying
listlessly upon her lap but with her eyes always resting on the farthest
line of the heather. Once she sat thus so long that Dowie crept out of
the empty stone chamber where she had been waiting and went and stood
behind her. At first Robin did not seem conscious of her presence but
presently she turned her head. There was a faintly bewildered look in
her eyes.

"I don't know why--when I look at the edge where the hill seems to
end--it always seems as if there might be something coming from the
place we can't see--" she said in a helpless-sounding voice. "We can
only see the sky behind as if the world ended there. But I feel as if
something might be coming from the other side. The horizon always looks
like that--now. There must be so much--where there seems to be nothing
more. I want to go."

She tried to smile a little as though at her own childish fancifulness
but suddenly a heavy shining tear fell on her hand. And her head dropped
and she murmured, "I'm sorry, Dowie," as if it were a fault.

The Macaurs watched her from afar with their own special order of silent
interest. But the sight of the slowly flitting and each day frailer
young body began to move them even to the length of low-uttered
expression of fear and pity.

"Some days she fair frights me passing by so slow and thin in her bit
black dress," Maggy said. "She minds me o' a lost birdie fluttering
about wi' a broken wing. She's gey young she is, to be a widow
woman--left like that."

The doctor came up the moor road every day and talked more to Dowie than
to his patient. As the weeks went by he could not sanely be hopeful.
Dowie's brave face seemed to have lost some of its colour at times. She
asked eager questions but his answers did not teach her any new thing.
Yet he was of a modern school.

"There was a time, Mrs. Dowson," he said, "when a doctor believed--or
thought he believed--that healing was carried in bottles. For thinking
men that time has passed. I know very little more of such a case as this
than you know yourself.