"No, my lord. The dream's a thing we don't talk about. She's only mentioned it three times. It's in my mind that she feels it's too sacred to be made common by words."
He had wondered if Robin had been aware of his knowledge. After Dowie's answer he wondered if she would speak to him about the dream herself. Perhaps she would not. It might be that she had asked him to come to Darreuch because her thought of him had so changed that she had realised something of his grave anxiety for her health and a gentle consideration had made her wish to give him the opportunity to see her face to face. Perhaps she had intended only this.
"I want to see her," he had said to himself. The relief of the mere seeing had been curiously great. He had the relief of sinking, as it were, into the deep waters of pure peace on this new planet. In this realisation every look at the child's face, every movement she made, every tone of her voice, aided. Did she know that she soothed him? Did she intend to try to soothe? When they were together she gave him a feeling that she was strangely near and soft and warm. He had felt it on the moor. It was actually as if she wanted to be quieting to him—almost as if she had realised that he had been stretched upon a mental rack with maddening tumult all around him. It was part of her pretty thought of him in the matter of the waiting chair and he felt it very sweet.
But she had had other things in her mind when she had asked him to come. This he knew later.
CHAPTER XXXIII
After they had dined they sat together in the long Highland twilight before her window in the Tower room where he had found her sitting when he arrived. Her work basket was near her and she took a piece of sheer lawn from it and began to embroider. And he sat and watched her draw delicate threads through the tiny leaves and flowers she was making. So he might have watched Alixe if she had been some unroyal girl given to him in one of life's kinder hours. She seemed to draw near out of the land of lost shadows as he sat in the clear twilight stillness and looked on. As he might have watched Alixe.
The silence, the paling daffodil tints of the sky, the non-existence of any other things than calm and stillness seemed to fill his whole being as a cup might be filled by pure water falling slowly. She said nothing and did not even seem to be waiting for anything. It was he who first broke the rather long silence and his voice was quite low.
"Do you know you are very good to me?" he said. "How did you learn to be so kind to a man—with your quietness?"