Sometimes she lay for long hours on the sofa by the open window but sometimes a restlessness came upon her and she wandered about the empty rooms of the little castle as though she were vaguely searching for something which was not there. Dowie furtively followed her at a distance knowing that she wanted to be alone. The wide stretches of the moor seemed to draw her. At times she stood gazing at them out of a window, sometimes she sat in a deep window seat with her hands lying listlessly upon her lap but with her eyes always resting on the farthest line of the heather. Once she sat thus so long that Dowie crept out of the empty stone chamber where she had been waiting and went and stood behind her. At first Robin did not seem conscious of her presence but presently she turned her head. There was a faintly bewildered look in her eyes.
"I don't know why—when I look at the edge where the hill seems to end—it always seems as if there might be something coming from the place we can't see—" she said in a helpless-sounding voice. "We can only see the sky behind as if the world ended there. But I feel as if something might be coming from the other side. The horizon always looks like that—now. There must be so much—where there seems to be nothing more. I want to go."
She tried to smile a little as though at her own childish fancifulness but suddenly a heavy shining tear fell on her hand. And her head dropped and she murmured, "I'm sorry, Dowie," as if it were a fault.
The Macaurs watched her from afar with their own special order of silent interest. But the sight of the slowly flitting and each day frailer young body began to move them even to the length of low-uttered expression of fear and pity.
"Some days she fair frights me passing by so slow and thin in her bit black dress," Maggy said. "She minds me o' a lost birdie fluttering about wi' a broken wing. She's gey young she is, to be a widow woman—left like that."
The doctor came up the moor road every day and talked more to Dowie than to his patient. As the weeks went by he could not sanely be hopeful. Dowie's brave face seemed to have lost some of its colour at times. She asked eager questions but his answers did not teach her any new thing. Yet he was of a modern school.
"There was a time, Mrs. Dowson," he said, "when a doctor believed—or thought he believed—that healing was carried in bottles. For thinking men that time has passed. I know very little more of such a case as this than you know yourself. You are practical and kind and watchful. You are doing all that can be done. So am I. But I am sorry to say that it seems as if only a sort of miracle—! If—as you said once—she would 'wake up'—there would be an added chance."
"Yes, sir," Dowie answered. "If she would. But it seems as if her mind has stopped thinking about things that are to come. You see it in her face. She can only remember. The days are nothing but dreams to her."
Dowie had written weekly letters to Lord Coombe in accordance with his request. She wrote a good clear hand and her method was as clear as her calligraphy. He invariably gathered from her what he most desired to know and learned that her courageous good sense was plainly to be counted upon. From the first her respectful phrases had not attempted to conceal from him the anxiety she had felt.
"It was the way she looked and that I hadn't expected to see such a change, that took the strength out of me the first time I saw her. And what your lordship had told me. It seemed as if the two things together were too much for her to face. I watch over her day and night though I try to hide from her that I watch so close. If she could be made to eat something, and to sleep, and not to break her little body to pieces with those dreadful fits of crying, there would be something to hold on to. But I shall hold on to her, my lord, whether there is anything to hold on to or not."