Chapter 31

After the first day of cutting out patterns from the models and finely
sewing tiny pieces of lawn together, Dowie saw that, before going to her
bedroom for the night, Robin began to gather together all she had done
and used in doing her work. She had ordered from London one of the
pretty silk-lined lace-frilled baskets women are familiar with, and she
neatly folded and laid her sewing in it. She touched each thing with
fingers that lingered; she smoothed and once or twice patted something.
She made exquisitely orderly little piles. Her down-dropped white lids
quivered with joy as she did it. When she lifted them to look at Dowie
her eyes were like those of a stray young spirit.

"I am going to take them into my room," she said. "I shall take them
every night. I want to keep them on a chair quite near me so that I can
put out my hand and touch them."

"Yes, my lamb," Dowie agreed cheerfully. But she knew she was going to
hear something else. And this would be the third time.

"I want to show them to Donal." The very perfection of her naturalness
gave Dowie a cold chill, even while she thanked God. She had shivered
inwardly when she had opened the Tower room window, and so she shivered
now despite her serene exterior. A simple unexalted body could not but
think of those fragments which were never even found. And she, standing
there with her lips and eyes smiling, just like any other radiant girl
mother whose young husband is her lover, enraptured and amazed by this
new miracle of hers!

Robin touched her with the tip of her finger.

"It can't be only a dream, Dowie," she said. "He's too real. I am too
real. We are too happy." She hesitated a second. "If he were here at
Darreuch in the daytime--I should not always know where he had been when
he was away. Only his coming back would matter. He can't tell me now
just where he comes from. He says 'Not yet.' But he comes. Every night,
Dowie."

* * * * *

Every day she sewed in the Tower room, her white eyelids drooping over
her work. Each night the basket was carried to her room. And each day
Dowie watched with amazement the hollows in her temples and cheeks and
under her eyes fill out, the small bones cover themselves, the thinned
throat grow round with young tissue and smooth with satin skin. Her hair
became light curled silk again; the faint colour deepened into the
Jacqueminot glow at which passers by had turned to look in the street
when she was little more than a baby. But she never talked of the dream.
The third time was the last for many weeks.

Between Doctor Benton and Dowie there grew up an increased reserve
concerning the dream. Never before had the