That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a result would be easier to avert than to deal with.
There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ in dealing with it now.
Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.
"The last charge the Mother laid on us—Sister Hilda-Antony and me—was to keep our eyes upon the child. The very day it was done she told us, and I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes." She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette with us.—There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she remembered her name?"
She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child represents, with round "O's" of different sizes for heads and bodies, and pitchforks for legs and arms....
Sister Tobias went on: "The Siege Gazette had come out that day, with the news of"—she dropped her voice to a whisper—"of her being likely to be married before long to him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest!" Sister Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of her blue-checked apron, making the Sign. "And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came round us at the Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before." Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. "But the child was happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him; and when the firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged us to turn out of it and call in at the Convent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only for a minute, not having seen her since the Sunday when——"
"Yes—yes!"
Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, nodded, bending his heavy brows. His ears were given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight figure that somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was buttoned awry, had the air of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her scrawled slate to ward off his look, and peeped at him round the side of it.
Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were angry. The Kid knew that so well.