The face of the whole world had changed since the night when she had sat among banked flowers and palms and ferns, and heard the splashing of the fountain and the sound of the music and dancing, and Donal Muir's voice, all at the same time. That which had happened had made everybody and everything different; and, because she lived in this particular house and saw much of special people, she realised that the growing shudder in the life about her was only the first convulsive tremor of an earthquake. The d.u.c.h.ess began to have much more for her to do. She called on her to read special articles in the papers, and to make notes and find references. Many visitors came to the house to discuss, to plan, to prepare for work. A number of good-looking, dancing boys had begun to come in and out in uniform, and with eager faces and a businesslike military air which oddly transformed them. The recalcitrant George was more transformed than any of the rest. His eyes looked almost fierce in their anxious intensity, his voice had taken on a somewhat hard defiant ring. It could not be possible that he had ever done that silly thing by the fountain and that she had splashed him from head to foot. It was plain that there were young soldiers who were straining at leashes, who were restless at being held back by the bindings of red tape, and who every hour were hearing things--true or untrue--which filled them with blind fury. As days pa.s.sed Robin heard some of these things--stories from Belgium--which caused her to stare straight before her, blanched with horror. It was not only the slaughter and helplessness which pictured itself before her--it was stories half hinted at about girls like herself--girls who were trapped and overpowered--carried into lonely or dark places where no one could hear them. Sometimes George and the d.u.c.h.ess forgot her because she was so quiet--people often forgot everything but their excitement and wrath--and every one who came in to talk, because the house had become a centre of activities, was full of new panics or defiances or rumours of happenings or possibilities.

The maelstrom had caught Robin herself in its whirling. She realised that she had changed with the rest. She was no longer only a girl who was looked at as she pa.s.sed along the street and who was beginning to be happy because she could earn her living. What was every girl in these days? How did any girl know what lay before her and those who protected the land she lived in? What could a girl do but try in some way to help--in any way to help the fight and the fighters. She used to lie awake and think of the d.u.c.h.ess' plans and concentrate her thought on the mastering of details. There was no hour too early or too late to find her ready to spring to attention. The d.u.c.h.ess had set her preparations for future possibilities in train before other women had quite begun to believe in their existence. Lady Lothwell had at first laughed quite gaily at certain long lists she found her mother occupied with--though this, it is true, was in early days.

But Robin, even while whirled by the maelstrom, could not cease thinking certain vague remote thoughts. The splashing of fountains among flowers, and the sound of music and dancing were far away--but there was an echo to which she listened unconsciously as Donal Muir did. Something she gave no name to. But as the, as yet unheard, guns sent forth vibrations which reached far, there rose before her pictures of columns of marching men--hundreds, thousands, young, erect, steady and with clear eyes--marching on and on--to what--to what? Would _every_ man go? Would there not be some who, for reasons, might not be obliged--or able--or ready--until perhaps the, as yet hoped for, sudden end of the awful thing had come? Surely there would be many who would be too young--or whose youth could not be spared because it stood for some power the nation needed in its future.

She had taken out and opened the lacquered box while thinking these things. She was thinking them as she looked at the key in her hand.

"It is not quiet anywhere now," she said to herself. "But there will be some corner under a tree in the Gardens where it will _seem_ quiet if one sits quite still there. I will go and try."

There were very few nursemaids with their charges in the place when she reached it about an hour later.

The military element filling the streets engendered a spirit of caution with regard to nursemaids in the minds of their employers. Even those who were not young and good-looking were somewhat shepherded. The two or three quite elderly ones in the Gardens cast serious glances at the girl who walked past them to a curve in the path where large lilac bushes and rhododendrons made a sort of nook for a seat under a tree.

They could not see her when she sat down and laid her book beside her on the bench. She did not even open it, but sat and looked at the greenery of the shrubs before her. She was very still, and she looked as if she saw more than mere leaves and branches.

After a few minutes she got up slowly and went to a tall bush of lilac.

She plucked several leaves and carried them back to her bench, somewhat as if she were a girl moving in a dream. Then, with a tiny shadow of a smile, she took a long pin from under the lapel of her coat and, leaning forward, began to p.r.i.c.k out a pattern on the leaf she had laid on the wooden seat. She was in the midst of doing it--had indeed decorated two or three--when she found herself turning her head to listen to something. It was a quick, buoyant marching step--not a nursemaid's, not a gardener's, and it was coming towards her corner as if with intention--and she suddenly knew that she was listening as if the intention concerned herself. This was only because there are psychological moments, moods, conditions at once physical and mental when every incident in life a.s.sumes the significance of intention--because unconsciously or consciously one is _waiting_.

Here was a crisp tread somehow conveying a suggestion of familiar happy eagerness. The tall young soldier who appeared from behind the clump of shrubs and stood before her with a laughing salute had evidently come hurriedly. And the hurry and laughter extraordinarily brought back the Donal who had sprung upon her years ago from dramatic ambush. It was Donal Muir who had come.

"I saw you from a friend's house across the street," he said. "I followed you."

He made no apology and it did not even cross her mind that apology was conventionally necessary. He sat down beside her and his effect--though it did not express itself physically--was that of one who was breathing quickly. The clear blueness of his gaze seemed to enfold and cover her.

The wonderfulness of him was the surrounding atmosphere she had felt as a little child.

"The whole world is rocking to and fro," he said. "It has gone mad. We are all mad. There is no time to wait for anything."

"I know! I know!" she whispered, because her pretty breast was rising and falling, and she had scarcely breath left to speak with.

Even as he looked down at her, and she up at him, the colour and laughter died out of him. Some suddenly returning memory brought a black cloud into his eyes and made him pale. He caught hold of both her hands and pressed them quite hard against his bowed face. He did not kiss them but held them against his cheek.

"It is terrible," he said.

Without being told she knew what he meant.

"You have been hearing new horrible things?" she said. What she guessed was that they were the kind of things she had shuddered at, feeling her blood at once hot and cold. He lifted his face but did not release her hands.

"At my friend's house. A man had just come over from Holland," he shook himself as if to dismiss a nightmare. "I did not come here to say such things. The enormous luck of catching sight of you, by mere chance, through the window electrified me. I--I came because I was catapulted here." He tried to smile and managed it pretty well. "How could I stay when--there you were! Going into the same garden!" He looked round him at the greenness with memory awakening. "It's the same garden. The shrubs have grown much bigger and they have planted some new ones--but it is the same garden." His look came back to her. "You are the same Robin," he said softly.

"Yes," she answered, as she had always answered "yes" to him.

"You are the same little child," he added and he lifted her hands again, but this time he kissed them as gently as he had spoken. "G.o.d! I'm glad!" And that was said softly, too. He was not a man of thirty or forty--he was a boy of twenty and his whole being was vibrating with the earthquake of the world.

That he vaguely recognised this last truth revealed itself in his next words.

"It would have taken me six months to say this much to you--to get this far--before this thing began," he said. "I daren't have run after you in the street. I should have had to wait about and make calls and ask for invitations to places where I might see you. And when we met we should have been polite and have talked all round what we wanted to say. It would have been cheek to tell you--the second time we met--that your eyes looked at me just as they did when you were a little child. I should have had to be decently careful because you might have felt shy.

You don't feel shy now, do you? No, you don't," in caressing conviction and appeal.

"No--no." There was the note of a little mating bird in the repeated word.

This time he spread one of her hands palm upward on his own larger one.

He looked down at it tenderly and stroked it as he talked.

"It is because there is no time. Things pour in upon us. We don't know what is before us. We can only be sure of one thing--that it may be death or wounds. I don't know when they'll think me ready to be sent out--or when they'll be ready to send me and other fellows like me. But I shall be sent. I am sitting in a garden here with you. I'm a young chap and big and strong and I love life. It is my duty as a man to go and kill other young chaps who love it as much as I do. And they must do their best to kill me, 'Gott strafe England,' they're saying in Germany--I understand it. Many a time it's in me to say, 'Gott strafe Germany.'"

He drew in his breath sharply, as if to pull himself together, and was still a moment. The next he turned upon her his wonderful boy's smile.

Suddenly there was trusting appeal in it.

"You don't mind my holding your hand and talking like this, do you? Your eyes are as soft as--I've seen fawns cropping among the primroses with eyes that looked like them. But yours _understand_. You don't mind my doing this?" he kissed her palm. "Because there is no time."

Her free hand caught at his sleeve.

"No," she said. "You're going--you're _going_!"

"Yes," he answered. "And you wouldn't hold me back."

"No! No! No! No!" she cried four times, "Belgium! Belgium! Oh! Belgium!"

And she hid her eyes on his sleeve.

"That's it--Belgium! There has been war before, but this promises from the outset to be something else. And they're coming on in their millions. We have no millions--we have not even guns and uniforms enough, but we've got to stop them, if we do it with our bare hands and with walls of our dead bodies. That was how Belgium held them back. Can England wait?"

"You can't wait!" cried Robin. "No man can wait."

How he glowed as he looked at her!

"There. That shows how you understand. See! That's what draws me. That's why, when I saw you through the window, I had to follow you. It wasn't only your lovely eyes and your curtains of eyelashes and because you are a sort of rose. It is you--you! Whatsoever you said, I should know the meaning of, and what I say you will always understand. It's as if we answered each other. That's why I never forgot you. It's why I waked up so when I saw you at the d.u.c.h.ess'." He tried to laugh, but did not quite succeed. "Do you know I have never had a moment's real rest since that night--because I haven't seen you."

"I--" faltered Robin, "have wondered and wondered--where you were."

All the forces of nature drew him a little nearer to her--though the gardener who clumped past them dully at the moment only saw a particularly good-looking young soldier, apparently engaged in agreeable conversation with a pretty girl who was not a nursemaid.

"Did you come here because of that?" he asked with frank anxiety. "Do you come here often and was it just chance? Or did you come because you were wondering?"

"I didn't exactly know--at first. But I know now. I have not been here since I went to live in Eaton Square," she gave back to him. Oh! how good and beautiful his asking eyes were! It was as he drew even a little nearer that he saw for the first time the p.r.i.c.ked lilac leaves lying on the bench beside her.

"Did you do those?" he said suddenly quite low. "Did you?"

"Yes," as low and quite sweetly unashamed. "You taught me--when we played together."

The quick emotion in his flushing face could scarcely be described.

"How lovely--how _lovely_ you are!" he exclaimed, almost under his breath. "I--I don't know how to say what I feel--about your remembering.

You little--little thing!" This last because he somehow strangely saw her five years old again.

It was a boy's unspoiled, first love making--the charming outburst of young pa.s.sion untrained by familiar use to phrases. It was like the rising of a Spring freshet and had the same irresistible power.

"May I have them? Will you give them to me with your own little hand?"