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 prick 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 assumes 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. "God! 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 Duchess'." He tried to laugh,