The Duchess watched her anxiously.
"It's so—lonely!" There was a hint of hysteric breakdown in the exclamation. "How can I—bear it!" She turned and went back to her writing table and there she sat down and hid her face, trembling in an extraordinary way.
"You are as unhappy as that?" said the Duchess. "And you are lonely?"
"All the world is lonely," Robin cried—not weeping, only shaking. "Everything is left to itself to suffer. God has gone away."
The Duchess trembled a little herself. She too had hideously felt something like the same thing at times of late. But this soft shaking thing—! There shot into her mind like a bolt a sudden thought. Was this something less inevitable—something more personal? She wondered what would be best to say.
"Even older people lose their nerve sometimes," she decided on at last. "When you said that work was the greatest help you were right. Work—and as much sleep as one can get, and walking and fresh air. And we must help each other—old and young. I want you to help me, child. I need you."
Robin stood up and steadied herself somehow. She took up a letter in a hand not yet quite still.
"Please need me," she said. "Please let me do everything—anything—and never stop. If I never stop in the day time perhaps I shall sleep better at night."
As there came surging in day by day bitter and cruel waves of war news—stories of slaughter by land and sea, of massacre in simple places, of savagery wrought on wounded men and prisoners in a hydrophobia of hate let loose, it was ill lying awake in the dark remembering loved beings surrounded by the worst of all the world has ever known. Robin was afraid to look at the newspapers which her very duties themselves obliged her to familiarise herself with, and she could not close her ears. With battleship raids on harmless coast towns, planned merely to the end of the wanton killing of such unconsidered trifles of humanity as little children and women and men at their every-day work, the circle of horror seemed to draw itself in closely.
Zeppelin raids leaving fragments of bodies on pavements and broken things under fallen walls, were not so near as the women who dragged themselves back to their work with death in their faces written large—the death of husband or son or lover. These brought realities close indeed.