Robin | Page 7

once play together in a garden?"
"Yes--yes."
Back swept the years, and the wonderful happiness began again.
* * * * *
In the shining ballroom the music rose and fell and swelled again into
ecstasy as he held her white young lightness in his arm and they
swayed and darted and swooped like things of the air--while the old
Duchess and Lord Coombe looked on almost unseeing and talked in
murmurs of Sarajevo.

ROBIN
CHAPTER I
It was a soft starlit night mystically changing into dawn when Donal
Muir left the tall, grave house on Eaton Square after the strangely
enchanted dance given by the old Dowager Duchess of Darte. A certain

impellingness of mood suggested that exercise would be a good thing
and he decided to walk home. It was an impellingness of body as well
as mind. He had remained later than the relative who had by chance
been responsible for his being brought, an uninvited guest, to the party.
The Duchess had not known that he was in London. It may also be
accepted as a fact that to this festivity given for the pleasure of Mrs.
Gareth-Lawless' daughter, she might not have chosen to assume the
responsibility of extending him an invitation. She knew something of
his mother and had sometimes discussed her with her old friend, Lord
Coombe. She admired Helen Muir greatly and was also much touched
by certain aspects of her maternity. What Lord Coombe had told her of
the meeting of the two children in the Gardens, of their innocent child
passion of attraction for each other, and of the unchildlike tragedy their
enforced parting had obviously been to both had at once deeply
interested and moved her. Coombe had only been able to relate certain
surface incidents connected with the matter, but they had been incidents
not easy to forget and from which unusual things might be deduced. No!
She would not have felt prepared to be the first to deliberately throw
these two young people across each other's paths at this glowing
moment of their early blooming--knowing as she did Helen Muir's
strongly anxious desire to keep them apart.
She had seen Donal Muir several times as the years had passed and had
not been blind to the physical beauty and allure of charm the rest of the
world saw and proclaimed with suitable adjectives. When the intimate
friend who was his relative appeared with him in her drawing-room and
she found standing before her, respectfully appealing for welcome with
a delightful smile, this quite incomparably good-looking young man,
she was conscious of a secret momentary disturbance and a recognition
of the fact that something a shade startling had happened.
"When a thing of the sort occurs entirely without one's aid and rather
against one's will--one may as well submit," she said later to Lord
Coombe. "Endeavouring to readjust matters is merely meddling with
Fate and always ends in disaster. As an incident, I felt there was a hint
in it that it would be the part of wisdom to leave things alone."

She had watched the two dancing with a kind of absorption in her gaze.
She had seen them go out of the room into the conservatory. She had
known exactly when they had returned and, seeing the look on their
young faces, had understood why the eyes of the beholders followed
them.
When Lord Coombe came in with the ominous story of the
assassination at Sarajevo, all else had been swept from her mind. There
had been place in her being for nothing but the shock of a monstrous
recognition. She had been a gravely conscious looker-on at the slow but
never ceasing growth of a world peril for too many years not to be
widely awake to each sign of its development.
"Servia, Russia, Austria, Germany. It will form a pretext and a clear
road to France and England," Lord Coombe had said.
"A broad, clear road," the Duchess had agreed breathlessly--and, while
she gazed before her, ceased to see the whirl of floating and fluttering
butterfly-wings of gauze or to hear the music to whose measure they
fluttered and floated.
But no sense of any connection with Sarajevo disturbed the swing of
the fox trot or the measure of the tango, and when Donal Muir walked
out into the summer air of the starlit street and lifted his face, because
already a faint touch of primrose dawn was showing itself on the
eastern sky, in his young world there was only recognition of a vague
tumult of heart and brain and blood.
"What's the matter?" he was thinking. "What have I been doing-- What
have I been saying? I've been like a chap in a dream. I'm not awake
yet."
All that he had said