ad been blotted
and blistered. She pushed her chair back and began to rise from it.

There had been a few seconds of dead silence. Lord Coombe had been
standing thinking and biting his lip. "He is gone!" he said. "_Gone!_"

They did not notice Robin as she left the room. Outside the door she
stood in the hall and looked up the staircase piteously. It looked so
long and steep that she felt it was like a path up a mountain. But she
moved towards the bottom step and began to climb stair by stair--stair
by stair--dragging at the rail of the balustrade.

When she reached her room she went in and shut the door. She fell down
upon the floor and sat there. Long ago his mother had taken him away
from her. Now the War had taken him. The spectre stood straight in the
path before her.

"It was such a short time," she said, shaking. "And he is gone. And the
fairy wood is there still--and the ferns!--All the nights--always!"

And what happened next was not a thing to be written about--though at
the time the same thing was perhaps at that very hour happening in
houses all over England.

CHAPTER XII

The effect of something like unreality produced in the mind of the
mature and experienced by a girl creature, can only be equaled by the
intensity of the sense of realness in the girl herself. That centre of
the world in which each human being exists is in her case more
poignantly a centre than any other. She passes smiling or serious, a
thing of untried eyes and fair unmarked smoothness of texture, and
onlookers who have lived longer than she know that the unmarked
untriedness is a sign that so far "nothing" has happened in her life and
in most cases believe that "nothing" is happening. They are quite sure
they know--long after the thing has ceased to be true. The surface of
her is so soft and fair, and its lack of any suggestion of abysses or
chasms seems to make them incredible things. But the centre of the world
contains all things and when one is at the beginning of life and sees
them for the first time they assume strange proportions. It enters a
room, it talks lightly or sweetly, it whirls about in an airy dance,
this pretty untested thing; and, among those for whom the belief in the
reality of strange proportions has modified itself through long
experience, only those of the thinking habit realise that at any moment
the testing--the marking with deep scores may begin or has perhaps begun
already. At eighteen or tw