Chapter 39 - Page 2

Donal."

* * * * *

The warm, tender breathing, semi-dormant, scarcely sentient-seeming
thing might indeed have been the reincarnation of what had in the past
so peculiarly reached bodily perfection. Robin, who mysteriously knew
every line and curve of the new-born body, could point out how each limb
and feature was an embryonic replica.

"Though he looks so tiny, he is not really little," was her lovely
yearning boast. "He is really very big. Dowie has known hundreds of
babies and they were none of them as big as he is. He is a giant--an
angel giant," burying her face in the soft red neck.

"It seemed to change me into another type of man," Coombe once said to
the Duchess.

The man into whom he had been transformed was he who lived through the
next few days at Darreuch even as though life were a kindly faithful
thing. Many other men, he told himself, must have lived as he did and he
wondered if any of them ever forgot it. It was a thing set apart.

He sat by Robin's side; they talked together; he retired to his own
rooms or went out for a long walk, coming back to her to talk again, or
read aloud, or to consider with her the marvel of the small thing by her
side, examining curled hands and feet with curious interest.

"But though they look so little, they are not really," she always said.
"See how long his fingers are and how they taper. And his foot is long,
too, and narrow and arched. Donal's was like it."

"Was," she said, and he wondered if she might not feel a pang as he
himself did.

He wondered often and sometimes, when he sat alone in his room at night,
found something more than wonder in his mind--something that, if she had
not forbidden it, would have been fear because of strange things he saw
in her.

He could not question her. He dared not even remotely touch on the
dream. She was so well, her child was so well. She was as any young
mother might have been who could be serene in her husband's absence
because she knew he was safe and would soon return.

"Is she always as calm?" he once asked Dowie. "Does she never seem to be
reminded of what would have been if he were alive?"

Dowie shook her head and he saw that the old anxiousness came back upon
her.

"My lord, she believes he _is_ alive when she sees him. That's what
troubles me even in my thankfulness. I don't understand, God help me! I
was afraid when she saw the child that it might all come over her again
in a way that would do her awful harm. But when I laid the little thing
down by her she just lay there herself and looked at it as if something
was uplifting her. And in a few seconds she