"Do you remember the dry leaves I wanted to keep when I was so little?" she whispered woefully. "I was too little to know how to save them. And you made me this tiny silk bag."
Dowie's face was almost frightened as she drew back to look. There was in her motherly soul the sudden sense of panic she had felt in the nursery so long ago.
"My blessed child!" she breathed. "Not that one—after all that time!"
"Yes," said Robin. "Look, Dowie—look."
She had taken a locket out of the silk bag and she opened it and Dowie looked.
Perhaps any woman would have felt what she felt when she saw the face which seemed to laugh rejoicing into hers, as if Life were such a supernal thing—as if it were literally the blessed gift of God as all the ages have preached to us even while they have railed at the burden of living and called it cruel nothingness. The radiance in the eyes' clearness, the splendid strength and joy in being, could have built themselves into nothing less than such beauty as this.
Dowie looked at it in dead silence, her breast heaving fast.
"Oh! blessed God!" she broke out with a gasp. "Did they kill—that!"
"Yes," said Robin, her voice scarcely more than a breath, "Donal."