She had poured out her strength in silence, and in silence he had received it. She saved him from slipping over the verge of madness.

But there came a day when he spoke to her of this—of the one woman he had loved, Princess Alixe of X—:

“There was never a human thing so transparently pure, and she was the possession of a brute incarnate. She shook with terror before him. He killed her.”

“I believe he did,” she said, unsteadily. “He was not received here at Court afterward.”

“He killed her. But she would have died of horror if he had not struck her a blow. I saw that. I was in attendance on him at Windsor.”

“When I first knew you,” the Duchess said gravely.

“There was a night—I was young—young—when I found myself face to face with her in the stillness of the wood. I went quite mad for a time. I threw myself face downward on the earth and sobbed. She knelt and prayed for her own soul as well as mine. I kissed the hem of her dress and left her standing—alone.”

After a silence he added:

“It was the next night that I heard her shrieks. Then she died.”

The Duchess knew what else had died: the high adventure of youth and joy of life in him.

On a table beside her winged chair were photographs of two women, who, while obviously belonging to periods of some twenty years apart, were in face and form so singularly alike that they might have been the same person. One was the Princess Alixe of X— and the other—Feather.

“The devil of chance,” Coombe said, “sometimes chooses to play tricks. Such a trick was played on me.”

It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange questioning gaze upon.

“When I saw this,” he said, “this—exquisitely smiling at me in a sunny garden—the tomb opened under my feet and I stood on the brink of it—twenty-five again.”

He made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have ironically disbelieved. He ended with the story of Robin.

“I am determined,” he explained, “ to stand between the child and what would be inevitable. Her frenzy of desire to support herself arises from her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathise with her entirely.”

“Mademoiselle Vallé is an intelligent woman,” the Duchess said. “Send her to me; I shall talk to her. Then she can bring the child.”

And so it was arranged that Robin should be taken into the house in the old fashioned square to do for the Duchess what a young relative might have done. And, a competent person being needed to take charge of the linen, “Dowie” would go to live under the same roof.

Feather’s final thrust in parting with her daughter was:

“Donal Muir is a young man by this time. I wonder what his mother would do now if he turned up at your mistress’ house and began to make love to you.” She laughed outright. “You’ll get into all sorts of messes but that would be the nicest one!”

The Duchess came to understand that Robin held it deep in her mind that she was a sort of young outcast.

“If she consorted,” she thought, “with other young things and shared their pleasures she would forget it.”

She talked the matter over with her daughter, Lady Lothwell.

“I am not launching a girl in society,” she said, “ I only want to help her to know a few nice young people. I shall begin with your children. They are mine if I am only a grandmother. A small dinner and a small dance—and George and Kathryn may be the beginning of an interesting experiment.”

The Duchess was rarely mistaken. The experiment was interesting. For George—Lord Halwyn—it held a certain element of disaster. It was he who danced with Robin first. He had heard of the girl who was a sort of sublimated companion to his grandmother.