"Before you go away—" she said as simply as she had said it to Dowie years before, "—may I kiss you, Lord Coombe? I want to kiss you."
His old friend had told him the story of Dowie and it had extraordinarily touched him though he had said but little. And now it repeated itself. He had never seen anything so movingly lovely in his life as her sweet gravity.
She lifted her slight arms and laid them around his neck as she kissed him gently, as if she had been his daughter—his own daughter and delight—whose mother might have been Alixe.
CHAPTER XXXV
"It was the strangest experience of my existence. It seemed suddenly to change me to another type of man."
He said it to the Duchess as he sat with her in her private room at Eaton Square. He had told her the whole story of his week at Darreuch and she had listened with an interest at moments almost breathless.
"Do you feel that you shall remain the new type of man, or was it only a temporary phase?" she inquired.
"I told her that I felt I was living on a new planet. London is the old planet and I have returned to it. But not as I left it. Something has come back with me."