A baby left unattended to scream itself to sleep and awakening to scream itself to sleep again, does not present to a resentful observer the flowerlike bloom and beauty of infancy. When Feather carried her tray into the Night Nursery and found herself confronting the disordered crib on which her offspring lay she felt the child horrible to look at. Its face was disfigured and its eyes almost closed. She trembled all over as she put the bottle to its mouth and saw the fiercely hungry clutch of its hands. It was old enough to clutch, and clutch it did, and suck furiously and starvingly—even though actually forced to stop once or twice at first to give vent to a thwarted remnant of a scream.

Feather had only seen it as downy whiteness and perfume in Louisa's arms or in its carriage. It had been a singularly vivid and brilliant-eyed baby at whom people looked as they passed.

"Who will give her a bath?" wailed Feather. "Who will change her clothes? Someone must! Could a woman by the day do it? Cook said I could get a woman by the day."

And then she remembered that one got servants from agencies. And where were the agencies? And even a woman "by the day" would demand wages and food to eat.

And then the front door bell rang.

What could she do—what could she do? Go downstairs and open the door herself and let everyone know! Let the ringer go on ringing until he was tired and went away? She was indeed hard driven, even though the wail had ceased as Robin clutched her bottle to her breast and fed with frenzy. Let them go away—let them! And then came the wild thought that it might be Something—the Something which must happen when things were at their worst! And if it had come and the house seemed to be empty! She did not walk down the stairs, she ran. Her heart beat until she reached the door out of breath and when she opened it stood their panting.

The people who waited upon the steps were strangers. They were very nice looking and quite young—a man and a woman very perfectly dressed. The man took a piece of paper out of his pocketbook and handed it to her with an agreeable apologetic courtesy.

"I hope we have not called early enough to disturb you," he said. "We waited until eleven but we are obliged to catch a train at half past. It is an 'order to view' from Carson & Bayle." He added this because Feather was staring at the paper.

Carson & Bayle were the agents they had rented the house from. It was Carson & Bayle's collector Robert had met on the threshold and sworn at two days before he had been taken ill. They were letting the house over her head and she would be turned out into the street?

The young man and woman finding themselves gazing at this exquisitely pretty creature in exquisite mourning, felt themselves appallingly embarrassed. She was plainly the widow Carson had spoken of. But why did she open the door herself? And why did she look as if she did not understand? Indignation against Carson & Bayle began to stir the young man.

"Beg pardon! So sorry! I am afraid we ought not to have come," he protested. "Agents ought to know better. They said you were giving up the house at once and we were afraid someone might take it."

Feather held the "order to view" in her hand and snared at them quite helplessly.

"There—are no—no servants to show it to you," she said. "If you could wait—a few days—perhaps—"

She was so lovely and Madame Helene's filmy black creation was in itself such an appeal, that the amiable young strangers gave up at once.

"Oh, certainly—certainly! Do excuse us! Carson and Bayle ought not to have—! We are so sorry. Good morning, GOOD morning," they gave forth in discomfited sympathy and politeness, and really quite scurried away.

Having shut the door on their retreat Feather stood shivering.

"I am going to be turned out of the house! I shall have to live in the street!" she thought. "Where shall I keep my clothes if I live in the street!"

Even she knew that she was thinking idiotically. Of course if everything was taken from you and sold, you would have no clothes at all, and wardrobes and drawers and closets would not matter. The realization that scarcely anything in the house had been paid for came home to her with a ghastly shock. She staggered upstairs to the first drawing-room in which there was a silly pretty little buhl writing table.

She felt even more senseless when she sank into a chair before it and drew a sheet of note-paper towards her. Her thoughts would not connect themselves with each other and she could not imagine what she ought to say in her letter to Coombe. In fact she seemed to have no thoughts at all. She could only remember the things which had happened, and she actually found she could write nothing else. There seemed nothing else in the world.

"Dear Lord Coombe," trailed tremulously over the page—"The house is quite empty. The servants have gone away. I have no money. And there is not any food. And I am going to be turned out into the street—and the baby is crying because it is hungry."

She stopped there, knowing it was not what she ought to say. And as she stopped and looked at the words she began herself to wail somewhat as Robin had wailed in the dark when she would not listen or go to her. It was like a beggar's letter—a beggar's! Telling him that she had no money and no food—and would be turned out for unpaid rent. And that the baby was crying because it was starving!

"It's a beggar's letter—just a beggar's," she cried out aloud to the empty room. "And it's tru-ue!" Robin's wail itself had not been more hopeless than hers was as she dropped her head and let it lie on the buhl table.

She was not however even to be allowed to let it lie there, for the next instant there fell on her startled ear quite echoing through the house another ring at the doorbell and two steely raps on the smart brass knocker. It was merely because she did not know what else to do, having just lost her wits entirely that she got up and trailed down the staircase again.

When she opened the door, Lord Coombe—the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form and perfect appointment as also of perfect expression—was standing on the threshold.



CHAPTER VI



If he had meant to speak he changed his mind after his first sight of her. He merely came in and closed the door behind him. Curious experiences with which life had provided him had added finish to an innate aptness of observation, and a fine readiness in action.

If she had been of another type he would have saved both her and himself a scene and steered ably through the difficulties of the situation towards a point where they could have met upon a normal plane. A very pretty woman with whose affairs one has nothing whatever to do, and whose pretty home has been the perfection of modern smartness of custom, suddenly opening her front door in the unexplained absence of a footman and confronting a visitor, plainly upon the verge of hysteria, suggests the necessity of promptness.

But Feather gave him not a breath's space. She was in fact not merely on the verge of her hysteria. She had gone farther. And here he was. Oh, here he was! She fell down upon her knees and actually clasped his immaculateness.

"Oh, Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe! Lord Coombe!" She said it three times because he presented to her but the one idea.

He did not drag himself away from her embrace but he distinctly removed himself from it.

"You must not fall upon your knees, Mrs. Lawless," he said. "Shall we go into the drawing-room?"

"I—was writing to you. I am starving—but it seemed too silly when I wrote it. And it's true!" Her broken words were as senseless in their sound as she had thought them when she saw them written.

"Will you come up into the drawing-room and tell me exactly what you mean," he said and he made her release him and stand upon her feet.

As the years had passed he had detached himself from so many weaknesses and their sequelae of emotion that he had felt himself a safely unreachable person. He was not young and he knew enough of the disagreeableness of consequences to be adroit in keeping out of the way of apparently harmless things which might be annoying. Yet as he followed Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and watched her stumbling up the stairs like a punished child he was aware that he was abnormally in danger of pitying her as he did not wish to pity people. The pity was also something apart from the feeling that it was hideous that a creature so lovely, so shallow and so fragile should have been caught in the great wheels of Life.

He knew what he had come to talk to her about but he had really no clear idea of what her circumstances actually were. Most people had of course guessed that her husband had been living on the edge of his resources and was accustomed to debt and duns, but a lovely being greeting you by clasping your knees and talking about "starving"—in this particular street in Mayfair, led one to ask oneself what one was walking into. Feather herself had not known, in fact neither had any other human being known, that there was a special reason why he had drifted into seeming rather to allow her about—why he had finally been counted among the frequenters of the narrow house—and why he had seemed to watch her a good deal sometimes with an expression of serious interest—sometimes with an air of irritation, and sometimes with no expression at all. But there existed this reason and this it was and this alone which had caused him to appear upon her threshold and it had also been the power which had prevented his disengaging himself with more incisive finality when he found himself ridiculously clasped about the knees as one who played the part of an obdurate parent in a melodrama.

Once in the familiar surroundings of her drawing-room her ash-gold blondness and her black gauzy frock heightened all her effects so extraordinarily that he frankly admitted to himself that she possessed assets which would have modified most things to most men.

As for Feather, when she herself beheld him against the background of the same intimate aspects, the effect of the sound of his voice, the manner in which he sat down in a chair and a certain remotely dim hint in the hue of his clothes and an almost concealed note of some touch of colour which scarcely seemed to belong to anything worn—were so reminiscent of the days which now seemed past forever that she began to cry again.

He received this with discreet lack of melodrama of tone.

"You mustn't do that, Mrs. Lawless," he said, "or I shall burst into tears myself. I am a sensitive creature."

"Oh, DO say 'Feather' instead of Mrs. Lawless," she implored. "Sometimes you said 'Feather'."

"I will say it now," he answered, "if you will not weep. It is an adorable name."

"I feel as if I should never hear it again," she shuddered, trying to dry her eyes. "It is all over!"

"What is all over?"

"This—!" turning a hopeless gaze upon the two tiny rooms crowded with knick-knacks and nonsense. "The parties and the fun—and everything in the world! I have only had some biscuits and raisins to eat today—and the landlord is going to turn me out."

It seemed almost too preposterous to quite credit that she was uttering naked truth.—And yet—! After a second's gaze at her be repeated what he had said below stairs.

"Will you tell me exactly what you mean?"

Then he sat still and listened while she poured it all forth. And as he listened he realized that it was the mere every day fact that they were sitting in the slice of a house with the cream-coloured front and the great lady in her mansion on one side and the millionaire and his splendours on the other, which peculiarly added to a certain hint of gruesomeness in the situation.

It was not necessary to add colour and desperation to the story. Any effort Feather had made in that direction would only have detracted from the nakedness of its stark facts. They were quite enough in themselves in their normal inevitableness. Feather in her pale and totally undignified panic presented the whole thing with clearness which had—without being aided by her—an actual dramatic value. This in spite of her mental dartings to and from and dragging in of points and bits of scenes which were not connected with each other. Only a brain whose processes of inclusion and exclusion were final and rapid could have followed her. Coombe watched her closely as she talked. No grief-stricken young widowed loneliness and heart-break were the background of her anguish. She was her own background and also her own foreground. The strength of the fine body laid prone on the bed of the room she held in horror, the white rigid face whose good looks had changed to something she could not bear to remember, had no pathos which was not concerned with the fact that Robert had amazingly and unnaturally failed her by dying and leaving her nothing but unpaid bills. This truth indeed made the situation more poignantly and finally squalid, as she brought forth one detail after another. There were bills which had been accumulating ever since they began their life in the narrow house, there had been trades-people who had been juggled with, promises made and supported by adroit tricks and cleverly invented misrepresentations and lies which neither of the pair had felt any compunctions about and had indeed laughed over. Coombe saw it all though he also saw that Feather did not know all she was telling him. He could realize the gradually increasing pressure and anger at tricks which betrayed themselves, and the gathering determination on the part of the creditors to end the matter in the only way in which it could be ended. It had come to this before Robert's illness, and Feather herself had heard of fierce interviews and had seen threatening letters, but she had not believed they could mean all they implied. Since things had been allowed to go on so long she felt that they would surely go on longer in the same way. There had been some serious threatening about the rent and the unpaid-for furniture. Robert's supporting idea had been that he might perhaps "get something out of Lawdor who wouldn't enjoy being the relation of a fellow who was turned into the street!"

"He ought to have done something," Feather plained. "Robert would have been Lord Lawdor himself if his uncle had died before he had all those disgusting children."

She was not aware that Coombe frequently refrained from saying things to her—but occasionally allowed himself NOT to refrain. He did not refrain now from making a simple comment.

"But he is extremely robust and he has the children. Six stalwart boys and a stalwart girl. Family feeling has apparently gone out of fashion."

As she wandered on with her story he mentally felt himself actually dragged into the shrimp-pink bedroom and standing an onlooker when the footman outside the door "did not know" where Tonson had gone. For a moment he felt conscious of the presence of some scent which would have been sure to exhale itself from draperies and wardrobe. He saw Cook put the account books on the small table, he heard her, he also comprehended her. And Feather at the window breathlessly watching the two cabs with the servants' trunks on top, and the servants respectably unprofessional in attire and going away quietly without an unpractical compunction—he saw these also and comprehended knowing exactly why compunctions had no part in latter-day domestic arrangements. Why should they?

When Feather reached the point where it became necessary to refer to Robin some fortunate memory of Alice's past warnings caused her to feel—quite suddenly—that certain details might be eliminated.

"She cried a little at first," she said, "but she fell asleep afterwards. I was glad she did because I was afraid to go to her in the dark."

"Was she in the dark?"

"I think so. Perhaps Louisa taught her to sleep without a light. There was none when I took her some condensed milk this morning. There was only c-con-d-densed milk to give her."

She shed tears and choked as she described her journey into the lower regions and the cockroaches scuttling away before her into their hiding-places.

"I MUST have a nurse! I MUST have one!" she almost sniffed. "Someone must change her clothes and give her a bath!"

"You can't?" Coombe said.

"I!" dropping her handkerchief. "How—how CAN I?"

"I don't know," he answered and picked up the handkerchief with an aloof grace of manner.

It was really Robin who was for Feather the breaking-point.

He thought she was in danger of flinging herself upon him again. She caught at his arm and her eyes of larkspur blue were actually wild.

"Don't you see where I am! How there is nothing and nobody—Don't you SEE?"

"Yes, I see," he answered. "You are quite right. There is nothing AND nobody. I have been to Lawdor myself."

"You have been to TALK to him?"

"Yesterday. That was my reason for coming here. He will not see you or be written to. He says he knows better to begin that sort of thing. It may be that family feeling has not the vogue it once had, but you may recall that your husband infuriated him years ago. Also England is a less certain quantity than it once was—and the man has a family. He will allow you a hundred a year but there he draws the line."

"A hundred a year!" Feather breathed. From her delicate shoulders hung floating scarf-like sleeves of black transparency and she lifted one of them and held it out like a night moth's wing—"This cost forty pounds," she said, her voice quite faint and low. "A good nurse would cost forty! A cook—and a footman and a maid—and a coachman—and the brougham—I don't know how much they would cost. Oh-h!"

She drooped forward upon her sofa and laid face downward on a cushion—slim, exquisite in line, lost in despair.

The effect produced was that she gave herself into his hands. He felt as well as saw it and considered. She had no suggestion to offer, no reserve. There she was.

"It is an incredible sort of situation," he said in an even, low-pitched tone rather as if he were thinking aloud, "but it is baldly real. It is actually simple. In a street in Mayfair a woman and child might—" He hesitated a second and a wailed word came forth from the cushion.

"Starve!"

He moved slightly and continued.

"Since their bills have not been paid the trades-people will not send in food. Servants will not stay in a house where they are not fed and receive no wages. No landlord will allow a tenant to occupy his property unless he pays rent. It may sound inhuman—but it is only human."

The cushion in which Feather's face was buried retained a faint scent of Robert's cigar smoke and the fragrance brought back to her things she had heard him say dispassionately about Lord Coombe as well as about other men. He had not been a puritanic or condemnatory person. She seemed to see herself groveling again on the floor of her bedroom and to feel the darkness and silence through which she had not dared to go to Robin.

Not another night like that! No! No!

"You must go to Jersey to your mother and father," Coombe said. "A hundred a year will help you there in your own home."

Then she sat upright and there was something in her lovely little countenance he had never seen before. It was actually determination.

"I have heard," she said, "of poor girls who were driven—by starvation to—to go on the streets. I—would go ANYWHERE before I would go back there."

"Anywhere!" he repeated, his own countenance expressing—or rather refusing to express something as new as the thing he had seen in her own.

"Anywhere!" she cried and then she did what he had thought her on the verge of doing a few minutes earlier—she fell at his feet and embraced his knees. She clung to him, she sobbed, her pretty hair loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

"Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe! Oh, Lord Coombe!" she cried as she had cried in the hall.

He rose and endeavoured to disengage himself as he had done before. This time with less success because she would not let him go. He had the greatest possible objection to scenes.

"Mrs. Lawless—Feather—I beg you will get up," he said.

But she had reached the point of not caring what happened if she could keep him. He was a gentleman—he had everything in the world. What did it matter?

"I have no one but you and—and you always seemed to like me, I would do anything—ANYONE asked me, if they would take care of me. I have always liked you very much—and I did amuse you—didn't I? You liked to come here."

There was something poignant about her delicate distraught loveliness and, in the remoteness of his being, a shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything for any man who would take care of her, produced an effect on him nothing else would have produced. Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph and Potiphar's wife rose before him and the vision of himself as Joseph irked a certain complexness of his mentality. Poignant as the thing was in its modern way, it was also faintly ridiculous.

Then Robin awakened and shrieked again. The sound which had gained strength through long sleep and also through added discomfort quite rang through the house. What that sound added to the moment he himself would not have been able to explain until long afterwards. But it singularly and impellingly added.

"Listen!" panted Feather. "She has begun again. And there is no one to go to her."

"Get up, Mrs. Lawless," he said. "Do I understand that you are willing that I arrange this for you!"

He helped her to her feet.

"Do you mean—really!" she faltered. "Will you—will you—?"

Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel's brimming with crystal drops which slipped—as a child's tears slip—down her cheeks. She clasped her hands in exquisite appeal. He stood for a moment quite still, his mind fled far away and he forgot where he was. And because of this the little simpleton's shallow discretion deserted her.

"If you were a—a marrying man—?" she said foolishly—almost in a whisper.

He recovered himself.

"I am not," with a finality which cut as cleanly as a surgical knife.

Something which was not the words was of a succinctness which filled her with new terror.

"I—I know!" she whimpered, "I only said if you were!"

"If I were—in this instance—it would make no difference." He saw the kind of slippery silliness he was dealing with and what it might transform itself into if allowed a loophole. "There must be no mistakes."

In her fright she saw him for a moment more distinctly than she had ever seen him before and hideous dread beset her lest she had blundered fatally.

"There shall be none," she gasped. "I always knew. There shall be none at all."

"Do you know what you are asking me?" he inquired.

"Yes, yes—I'm not a girl, you know. I've been married. I won't go home. I can't starve or live in awful lodgings. SOMEBODY must save me!"

"Do you know what people will say?" his steady voice was slightly lower.

"It won't be said to me." Rather wildly. "Nobody minds—really."

He ceased altogether to look serious. He smiled with the light detached air his world was most familiar with.

"No—they don't really," he answered. "I had, however, a slight preference for knowing whether you would or not. You flatter me by intimating that you would not."

He knew that if he had held out an arm she would have fallen upon his breast and wept there, but he was not at the moment in the mood to hold out an arm. He merely touched hers with a light pressure.

"Let us sit down and talk it over," he suggested.

A hansom drove up to the door and stopped before he had time to seat himself. Hearing it he went to the window and saw a stout businesslike looking man get out, accompanied by an attendant. There followed a loud, authoritative ringing of the bell and an equally authoritative rap of the knocker. This repeated itself. Feather, who had run to the window and caught sight of the stout man, clutched his sleeve.

"It's the agent we took the house from. We always said we were out. It's either Carson or Bayle. I don't know which."

Coombe walked toward the staircase.

"You can't open the door!" she shrilled.

"He has doubtless come prepared to open it himself." he answered and proceeded at leisure down the narrow stairway.

The caller had come prepared. By the time Coombe stood in the hall a latchkey was put in the keyhole and, being turned, the door opened to let in Carson—or Bayle—who entered with an air of angered determination, followed by his young man.

The physical presence of the Head of the House of Coombe was always described as a subtly impressive one. Several centuries of rather careful breeding had resulted in his seeming to represent things by silent implication. A man who has never found the necessity of explaining or excusing himself inevitably presents a front wholly unsuggestive of uncertainty. The front Coombe presented merely awaited explanations from others.

Carson—or Bayle—had doubtless contemplated seeing a frightened servant trying to prepare a stammering obvious lie. He confronted a tall, thin man about whom—even if his clothes had been totally different—there could be no mistake. He stood awaiting an apology so evidently that Carson—or Bayle—began to stammer himself even before he had time to dismiss from his voice the suggestion of bluster. It would have irritated Coombe immensely if he had known that he—and a certain overcoat—had been once pointed out to the man at Sandown and that—in consequence of the overcoat—he vaguely recognized him.

"I—I beg pardon," he began.

"Quite so," said Coombe.

"Some tenants came to look at the house this morning. They had an order to view from us. They were sent away, my lord—and decline to come back. The rent has not been paid since the first half year. There is no one now who can even PRETEND it's going to be paid. Some step had to be taken."

"Quite so," said Coombe. "Suppose you step into the dining-room."

He led the pair into the room and pointed to chairs, but neither the agent nor his attendant was calm enough to sit down.

Coombe merely stood and explained himself.

"I quite understand," he said. "You are entirely within your rights. Mrs. Gareth-Lawless is, naturally, not able to attend to business. For the present—as a friend of her late husband's—I will arrange matters for her. I am Lord Coombe. She does not wish to give up the house. Don't send any more possible tenants. Call at Coombe House in an hour and I will give you a cheque."

There were a few awkward apologetic moments and then the front door opened and shut, the hansom jingled away and Coombe returned to the drawing-room. Robin was still shrieking.

"She wants some more condensed milk," he said. "Don't be frightened. Go and give her some. I know an elderly woman who understands children. She was a nurse some years ago. I will send her here at once. Kindly give me the account books. My housekeeper will send you some servants. The trades-people will come for orders."

Feather was staring at him.

"W-will they?" she stammered. "W-will everything—?"

"Yes—everything," he answered. "Don't be frightened. Go upstairs and try to stop her. I must go now. I never heard a creature yell with such fury."

She turned away and went towards the second flight of stairs with a rather dazed air. She had passed through a rather tremendous crisis and she WAS dazed. He made her feel so. She had never understood him for a moment and she did not understand him now—but then she never did understand people and the whole situation was a new one to her. If she had not been driven to the wall she would have been quite as respectable as she knew how to be.

Coombe called a hansom and drove home, thinking of many things and looking even more than usually detached. He had remarked the facial expression of the short and stout man as he had got into his cab and he was turning over mentally his own exact knowledge of the views the business mind would have held and what the business countenance would have decently covered if he—Coombe—had explained in detail that he was so far—in this particular case—an entirely blameless character.



CHAPTER VII



The slice of a house from that time forward presented the external aspect to which the inhabitants of the narrow and fashionable street and those who passed through it had been accustomed. Such individuals as had anticipated beholding at some early day notices conspicuously placed announcing "Sale by Auction. Elegant Modern Furniture" were vaguely puzzled as well as surprised by the fact that no such notices appeared even inconspicuously. Also there did not draw up before the door—even as the weeks went on—huge and heavy removal vans with their resultant litter, their final note of farewell a "To Let" in the front windows.

On the contrary, the florist came and refilled the window boxes with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers; new and even more correct servants were to be seen ascending and descending the area step; a young footman quite as smart as the departed Edward opened the front door and attended Mrs. Gareth-Lawless to her perfect little brougham. The trades-people appeared promptly every day and were obsequiously respectful in manner. Evidently the household had not disintegrated as a result of the death of Mr. Gareth-Lawless.

As it became an established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing indeed the air of people who had never really remained away from it. There had been natural reasons enough for considerate absence from a house of bereavement and a desolate widow upon whose grief it would have been indelicate to intrude. As Feather herself had realized, the circle of her intimates was not formed of those who could readily adjust themselves to entirely changed circumstances. If you dance on a tight rope and the rope is unexpectedly withdrawn, where are you? You cannot continue dancing until the rope is restrung.

The rope, however, being apparently made absolutely secure, it was not long before the dancing began again. Feather's mourning, wonderfully shading itself from month to month, was the joy of all beholders. Madame Helene treated her as a star gleaming through gradually dispersing clouds. Her circle watched her with secretly humorous interest as each fine veil of dimness was withdrawn.

"The things she wears are priceless," was said amiably in her own drawing-room. "Where does she get them? Figure to yourself Lawdor paying the bills."

"She gets them from Helene," said a long thin young man with a rather good-looking narrow face and dark eyes, peering through pince nez, "But I couldn't."

In places where entertainment as a means of existence proceed so to speak, fast and furiously, questions of taste are not dwelt upon at leisure. You need not hesitate before saying anything you liked in any one's drawing-room so long as it was amusing enough to make somebody—if not everybody—laugh. Feather had made people laugh in the same fashion in the past. The persons she most admired were always making sly little impudent comments and suggestions, and the thwarted years on the island of Jersey had, in her case, resulted in an almost hectic desire to keep pace. Her efforts had usually been successes because Nature's self had provided her with the manner of a silly pretty child who did not know how far she went. Shouts of laughter had often greeted her, and the first time she had for a moment doubted her prowess was on an occasion when she had caught a glimpse of Coombe who stared at her with an expression which she would—just for one second—have felt might be horror, if she had not been so sure it couldn't be, and must of course be something else—one of the things nobody ever understood in him.

By the time the softly swathing veils of vaporous darkness were withdrawn, and the tight rope assuring everyone of its permanent security became a trusted support, Feather at her crowded little parties and at other people's bigger ones did not remain wholly unaware of the probability that even people who rather liked her made, among themselves, more or less witty comments upon her improved fortunes. They were improved greatly. Bills were paid, trades-people were polite, servants were respectful; she had no need to invent excuses and lies. She and Robert had always kept out of the way of stodgy, critical people, so they had been intimate with none of the punctilious who might have withdrawn themselves from a condition of things they chose to disapprove: accordingly, she found no gaps in her circle. Those who had formed the habit of amusing themselves at her house were as ready as before to amuse themselves again.

The fact remained, however,—curiously, perhaps, in connection with the usual slightness of all impressions made on her—that there was a memory which never wholly left her. Even when she tried to force it so far into the background of her existence that it might almost be counted as forgotten, it had a trick of rising before her. It was the memory of the empty house as its emptiness had struck to the centre of her being when she had turned from her bedroom window after watching the servants drive away in their cabs. It was also the memory of the hours which had followed—the night in which nobody had been in any of the rooms—no one had gone up or down the stairs—when all had seemed dark and hollow—except the Night Nursery where Robin screamed, and her own room where she herself cowered under the bed clothes and pulled the pillow over her head. But though the picture would not let itself be blotted out, its effect was rather to intensify her sense of relief because she had slipped so safely from under the wheels of destiny.

"Sometimes," she revealed artlessly to Coombe, "while I am driving in the park on a fine afternoon when every one is out and the dresses look like the flower beds, I let myself remember it just to make myself enjoy everything more by contrast."

The elderly woman who had been a nurse in her youth and who had been sent by Lord Coombe temporarily to replace Louisa had not remained long in charge of Robin. She was not young and smart enough for a house on the right side of the right street, and Feather found a young person who looked exactly as she should when she pushed the child's carriage before her around the square.

The square—out of which the right street branches—and the "Gardens" in the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were admitted by private key, the basement kitchen and Servants' Hall, and the two top floor nurseries represented the world to the child Robin for some years. When she was old enough to walk in the street she was led by the hand over the ground she had travelled daily in her baby carriage. Her first memory of things was a memory of standing on the gravel path in the Square Gardens and watching some sparrows quarrel while Andrews, her nurse, sat on a bench with another nurse and talked in low tones. They were talking in a way Robin always connected with servants and which she naturally accepted as being the method of expression of their species—much as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs. As she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they were generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.

She liked watching the sparrows in the Gardens because she liked watching sparrows at all times. They were the only friends she had ever known, though she was not old enough to call them friends, or to know what friends meant. Andrews had taught her, by means of a system of her own, to know better than to cry or to make any protesting noise when she was left alone in her ugly small nursery. Andrews' idea of her duties did not involve boring herself to death by sitting in a room on the top floor when livelier entertainment awaited her in the basement where the cook was a woman of wide experience, the housemaid a young person who had lived in gay country houses, and the footman at once a young man of spirit and humour. So Robin spent many hours of the day—taking them altogether—quite by herself. She might have more potently resented her isolations if she had ever known any other condition than that of a child in whom no one was in the least interested and in whom "being good" could only mean being passive under neglect and calling no one's attention to the fact that she wanted anything from anybody. As a bird born in captivity lives in its cage and perhaps believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery and knew every square inch of it with a deadly if unconscious sense of distaste and fatigue. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day—twice perhaps if Andrews chose—she was taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all. And that was why she liked the sparrows so much.

And sparrows are worth watching if you live in a nursery where nothing ever happens and where, when you look out, you are so high up that it is not easy to see the people in the world below, in addition to which it seems nearly always raining. Robin used to watch them hopping about on the slate roofs of the homes on the other side of the street. They fluttered their wings, they picked up straws and carried them away. She thought they must have houses of their own among the chimneys—in places she could not see. She fancied it would be nice to hop about on the top of a roof oneself if one were not at all afraid of falling. She liked the chippering and chirping sounds the birds made became it sounded like talking and laughing—like the talking and laughing she sometimes wakened out of her sleep to lie and listen to when the Lady Downstairs had a party. She often wondered what the people were doing because it sounded as if they liked doing it very much.

Sometimes when it had rained two or three days she had a feeling which made her begin to cry to herself—but not aloud. She had once had a little black and blue mark on her arm for a week where Andrews had pinched her because she had cried loud enough to be heard. It had seemed to her that Andrews twisted and pinched the bit of flesh for five minutes without letting it go and she had held her large hand over her mouth as she did it.

"Now you keep that in your mind," she had said when she had finished and Robin had almost choked in her awful little struggle to keep back all sound.

The one thing Andrews was surest of was that nobody would come upstairs to the Nursery to inquire the meaning of any cries which were not unearthly enough to disturb the household. So it was easy to regulate the existence of her charge in such a manner as best suited herself.

"Just give her food enough and keep her from making silly noises when she wants what she doesn't get," said Andrews to her companions below stairs. "That one in the drawing-room isn't going to interfere with the Nursery. Not her! I know my business and I know how to manage her kind. I go to her politely now and then and ask her permission to buy things from Best's or Liberty's or some other good place. She always stares a minute when I begin, as if she scarcely understood what I was talking about and then she says 'Oh, yes, I suppose she must have them.' And I go and get them. I keep her as well dressed as any child in Mayfair. And she's been a beauty since she was a year old so she looks first rate when I wheel her up and down the street, so the people can see she's well taken care of and not kept hidden away. No one can complain of her looks and nobody is bothered with her. That's all that's wanted of ME. I get good wages and I get them regular. I don't turn up my nose at a place like this, whatever the outside talk is. Who cares in these days anyway? Fashionable people's broader minded than they used to be. In Queen Victoria's young days they tell me servants were no class that didn't live in families where they kept the commandments."

"Fat lot the commandments give any one trouble in these times," said Jennings, the footman, who was a wit. "There's one of 'em I could mention that's been broken till there's no bits of it left to keep. If I smashed that plate until it was powder it'd have to be swept into the dust din. That's what happened to one or two commandments in particular."

"Well," remarked Mrs. Blayne, the cook, "she don't interfere and he pays the bills prompt. That'll do ME instead of commandments. If you'll believe me, my mother told me that in them Queen Victoria days ladies used to inquire about cold meat and ask what was done with the dripping. Civilisation's gone beyond that—commandments or no commandments."

"He's precious particular about bills being paid," volunteered Jennings, with the air of a man of the world. "I heard him having a row with her one day about some bills she hadn't paid. She'd spent the money for some nonsense and he was pretty stiff in that queer way of his. Quite right he was too. I'd have been the same myself," pulling up his collar and stretching his neck in a manner indicating exact knowledge of the natural sentiments of a Marquis when justly annoyed. "What he intimated was that if them bills was not paid with the money that was meant to pay them, the money wouldn't be forthcoming the next time." Jennings was rather pleased by the word "forthcoming" and therefore he repeated it with emphasis, "It wouldn't be FORTHCOMING."

"That'd frighten her," was Andrews' succinct observation.

"It did!" said Jennings. "She'd have gone in hysterics if he hadn't kept her down. He's got a way with him, Coombe has."

Andrews laughed, a brief, dry laugh.

"Do you know what the child calls her?" she said. "She calls her the Lady Downstairs. She's got a sort of fancy for her and tries to get peeps at her when we go out. I notice she always cranes her little neck if we pass a room she might chance to be in. It's her pretty clothes and her laughing that does it. Children's drawn by bright colours and noise that sounds merry."

"It's my belief the child doesn't know she IS her mother!" said Mrs. Blayne as she opened an oven door to look at some rolls.

"It's my belief that if I told her she was she wouldn't know what the word meant. It was me she got the name from," Andrews still laughed as she explained. "I used to tell her about the Lady Downstairs would hear if she made a noise, or I'd say I'd let her have a peep at the Lady Downstairs if she was very good. I saw she had a kind of awe of her though she liked her so much, so it was a good way of managing her. You mayn't believe me but for a good bit I didn't take in that she didn't know there was such things as mothers and, when I did take it in, I saw there wasn't any use in trying to explain. She wouldn't have understood."

"How would you go about to explain a mother, anyway?" suggested Jennings. "I'd have to say that she was the person that had the right to slap your head if you didn't do what she told you."

"I'd have to say that she was the woman that could keep you slaving at kitchen maid's work fifteen hours a day," said Mrs. Blayne; "My mother was cook in a big house and trained me under her."

"I never had one," said Andrews stiffly. The truth was that she had taken care of eight infant brothers and sisters, while her maternal parent slept raucously under the influence of beer when she was not quarrelling with her offspring.

Jane, the housemaid, had passed a not uncomfortable childhood in the country and was perhaps of a soft nature.

"I'd say that a mother's the one that you belong to and that's fond of you, even if she does keep you straight," she put in.

"Her mother isn't fond of her and doesn't keep herself straight," said Jennings. "So that wouldn't do."

"And she doesn't slap her head or teach her to do kitchen maid's work," put in Mrs. Blayne, "so yours is no use, Mr. Jennings, and neither is mine. Miss Andrews 'll have to cook up an explanation of her own herself when she finds she has to."

"She can get it out of a Drury Lane melodrama," said Jennings, with great humour. "You'll have to sit down some night, Miss Andrews, and say, 'The time has come, me chee-ild, when I must tell you All'."

In this manner were Mrs. Gareth-Lawless and her maternal affections discussed below stairs. The interesting fact remained that to Robin the Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being who floated through certain rooms laughing or chattering like a bird, and always wearing pretty clothes, which were different each time one beheld her. Sometimes one might catch a glimpse of her through a door, or, if one pressed one's face against the window pane at the right moment, she might get into her bright little carnage in the street below and, after Jennings had shut its door, she might be seen to give a lovely flutter to her clothes as she settled back against the richly dark blue cushions.

It is a somewhat portentous thing to realize that a newborn human creature can only know what it is taught. The teaching may be conscious or unconscious, intelligent or idiotic, exquisite or brutal. The images presented by those surrounding it, as its perceptions awaken day by day, are those which record themselves on its soul, its brain, its physical being which is its sole means of expressing, during physical life, all it has learned. That which automatically becomes the Law at the dawning of newborn consciousness remains, to its understanding, the Law of Being, the Law of the Universe. To the cautious of responsibility this at times wears the aspect of an awesome thing, suggesting, however remotely, that it might seem well, perhaps, to remove the shoes from one's feet, as it were, and tread with deliberate and delicate considering of one's steps, as do the reverently courteous even on the approaching of an unknown altar.

This being acknowledged a scientific, as well as a spiritual truth, there remains no mystery in the fact that Robin at six years old—when she watched the sparrows in the Square Gardens—did not know the name of the feeling which had grown within her as a result of her pleasure in the chance glimpses of the Lady Downstairs. It was a feeling which made her eager to see her or anything which belonged to her; it made her strain her child ears to catch the sound of her voice; it made her long to hear Andrews or the other servants speak of her, and yet much too shy to dare to ask any questions. She had found a place on the staircase leading to the Nursery, where, by squeezing against the balustrade, she could sometimes see the Lady pass in and out of her pink bedroom. She used to sit on a step and peer between the railing with beating heart. Sometimes, after she had been put to bed for the night and Andrews was safely entertained downstairs, Robin would be awakened from her first sleep by sounds in the room below and would creep out of bed and down to her special step and, crouching in a hectic joy, would see the Lady come out with sparkling things in her hair and round her lovely, very bare white neck and arms, all swathed in tints and draperies which made her seem a vision of colour and light. She was so radiant a thing that often the child drew in her breath with a sound like a little sob of ecstasy, and her lip trembled as if she were going to cry. But she did not know that what she felt was the yearning of a thing called love—a quite simple and natural common thing of which she had no reason for having any personal knowledge. As she was unaware of mothers, so she was unaware of affection, of which Andrews would have felt it to be superfluously sentimental to talk to her.

On the very rare occasions when the Lady Downstairs appeared on the threshold of the Day Nursery, Robin—always having been freshly dressed in one of her nicest frocks—stood and stared with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put to her. The Lady appeared at such rare intervals and remained poised upon the threshold like a tropic plumaged bird for moments so brief, that there never was time to do more than lose breath and gaze as at a sudden vision. Why she came—when she did come—Robin did not understand. She evidently did not belong to the small, dingy nurseries which grew shabbier every year as they grew steadily more grimy under the persistent London soot and fogs.

Feather always held up her draperies when she came. She would not have come at all but for the fact that she had once or twice been asked if the child was growing pretty, and it would have seemed absurd to admit that she never saw her at all.

"I think she's rather pretty," she said downstairs. "She's round and she has a bright colour—almost too bright, and her eyes are round too. She's either rather stupid or she's shy—and one's as bad as the other. She's a child that stares."

If, when Andrews had taken her into the Gardens, she had played with other children, Robin would no doubt have learned something of the existence and normal attitude of mothers through the mere accident of childish chatter, but it somehow happened that she never formed relations with the charges of other nurses. She took it for granted for some time that this was because Andrews had laid down some mysterious law. Andrews did not seem to form acquaintances herself. Sometimes she sat on a bench and talked a little to another nurse, but she seldom sat twice with the same person. It was indeed generally her custom to sit alone, crocheting or sewing, with a rather lofty and exclusive air and to call Robin back to her side if she saw her slowly edging towards some other child.

"My rule is to keep myself to myself," she said in the kitchen. "And to look as if I was the one that would turn up noses, if noses was to be turned up. There's those that would snatch away their children if I let Robin begin to make up to them. Some wouldn't, of course, but I'm not going to run risks. I'm going to save my own pride."

But one morning when Robin was watching her sparrows, a nurse, who was an old acquaintance, surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens with two little girls in her charge. They were children of nine and eleven and quite sufficient for themselves, apart from the fact that they regarded Robin as a baby and, therefore, took no notice of her. They began playing with skipping ropes, which left their nurse free to engage in delighted conversation with Andrews.

It was conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten, even to the extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of shrubbery and, therefore, out of Andrews' sight, though she was only a few yards away. The sparrows this morning were quarrelsome and suddenly engaged in a fight, pecking each other furiously, beating their wings and uttering shrill, protesting chipperings. Robin did not quite understand what they were doing and stood watching them with spellbound interest.

It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps on the gravel walk which stopped near her and made her look up to see who was at her side. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporan was standing by her, and she found herself staring into a pair of handsome deep blue eyes, blue like the waters of a hillside tarn. They were wide, glowing, friendly eyes and none like them had ever looked into hers before. He seemed to her to be a very big boy indeed, and in fact, he was unusually tall and broad for his age, but he was only eight years old and a simple enough child pagan. Robin's heart began to beat as it did when she watched the Lady Downstairs, but there was something different in the beating. It was something which made her red mouth spread and curve itself into a smile which showed all her small teeth.

So they stood and stared at each other and for some strange, strange reason—created, perhaps, with the creating of Man and still hidden among the deep secrets of the Universe—they were drawn to each other—wanted each other—knew each other. Their advances were, of course, of the most primitive—as primitive and as much a matter of instinct as the nosing and sniffing of young animals. He spread and curved his red mouth and showed the healthy whiteness of his own handsome teeth as she had shown her smaller ones. Then he began to run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. He tossed his curled head and laughed to make her laugh also, and she not only laughed but clapped her hands. He was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen before in her life, and he was plainly trying to please her. No child creature had ever done anything like it before, because no child creature had ever been allowed by Andrews to make friends with her. He, on his part, was only doing what any other little boy animal would have done—expressing his child masculinity by "showing off" before a little female. But to this little female it had never happened before.

It was all beautifully elemental. As does not too often happen, two souls as well as two bodies were drawn towards each other by the Magnet of Being. When he had exhibited himself for a minute or two he came back to her, breathing fast and glowing.

"My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. He is a Shetland pony and he is only that high," he measured forty inches from the ground. "I'm called Donal. What are you called?"

"Robin," she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so beautiful. His hair was bright and curly. His broad forehead was clear white where he had pushed back his bonnet with the eagle feather standing upright on it. His strong legs and knees were white between his tartan kilt and his rolled back stockings. The clasps which held his feather and the plaid over his shoulder were set with fine stones in rich silver. She did not know that he was perfectly equipped as a little Highland chieftain, the head of his clan, should be.

They began to play together, and the unknown Fates, which do their work as they choose, so wrought on this occasion as to cause Andrews' friend to set forth upon a journey through a story so exciting in its nature that its hearer was held spellbound and oblivious to her surroundings themselves. Once, it is true, she rose as in a dream and walked round the group of shrubs, but the Fates had arranged for that moment also. Robin was alone and was busily playing with some leaves she had plucked and laid on the seat of a bench for some mysterious reason. She looked good for an hour's safe occupation, and Andrews returned to her friend's detailed and intimate version of a great country house scandal, of which the papers were full because it had ended in the divorce court.

Donal had, at that special moment, gone to pick some of the biggest leaves from the lilac bush of which the Gardens contained numerous sooty specimens. The leaves Robin was playing with were some he had plucked first to show her a wonderful thing. If you laid a leaf flat on the seat of the bench and were fortunate enough to possess a large pin you could prick beautiful patterns on the leaf's greenness—dots and circles, and borders and tiny triangles of a most decorative order. Neither Donal nor Robin had a pin but Donal had, in his rolled down stocking, a little dirk the point of which could apparently be used for any interesting purpose. It was really he who did the decoration, but Robin leaned against the bench and looked on enthralled. She had never been happy before in the entire course of her brief existence. She had not known or expected and conditions other than those she was familiar with—the conditions of being fed and clothed, kept clean and exercised, but totally unloved and unentertained. She did not even know that this nearness to another human creature, the exchange of companionable looks, which were like flashes of sunlight, the mutual outbreaks of child laughter and pleasure were happiness. To her, what she felt, the glow and delight of it, had no name but she wanted it to go on and on, never to be put an end to by Andrews or anyone else.

The boy Donal was not so unconscious. He had been happy all his life. What he felt was that he had liked this little girl the minute he saw her. She was pretty, though he thought her immensely younger than himself, and, when she had looked up at him with her round, asking eyes, he had wanted to talk to her and make friends. He had not played much with boys and he had no haughty objection to girls who liked him. This one did, he saw at once.

Through what means children so quickly convey to each other—while seeming scarcely to do more than play—the entire history of their lives and surroundings, is a sort of occult secret. It is not a matter of prolonged conversation. Perhaps images created by the briefest of unadorned statements produce on the unwritten tablets of the child mind immediate and complete impressions. Safe as the locked garden was, Andrews cannot have forgotten her charge for any very great length of time and yet before Donal, hearing his attendant's voice from her corner, left Robin to join her and be taken home, the two children knew each other intimately. Robin knew that Donal's home was in Scotland—where there are hills and moors with stags on them. He lived there with "Mother" and he had been brought to London for a visit. The person he called "Mother" was a woman who took care of him and he spoke of her quite often. Robin did not think she was like Andrews, though she did not in the least know why. On his part Donal knew about the nurseries and the sparrows who hopped about on the slates of the houses opposite. Robin did not describe the nurseries to him, but Donal knew that they were ugly and that there were no toys in them and nothing to do. Also, in some mystic fashion, he realized that Andrews would not let Robin play with him if she saw them together, and that, therefore, they must make the most of their time. Full of their joy in each other, they actually embarked upon an ingenious infant intrigue, which involved their trying to meet behind the shrubs if they were brought to the Gardens the next day. Donal was sure he could come because his nurse always did what he asked of her. He was so big now that she was not a real nurse, but she had been his nurse when he was quite little and "Mother" liked her to travel with them. He had a tutor but he had stayed behind in Scotland at Braemarnie, which was their house. Donal would come tomorrow and he would look for Robin and when she saw him she must get away from Andrews and they would play together again.

"I will bring one of my picture books," he said grandly. "Can you read at all?"

"No," answered Robin adoring him. "What are picture books?"

"Haven't you any?" he blurted out.

"No," said Robin. She looked at the gravel walk, reflecting a moment thoughtfully on the Day Nursery and the Night Nursery. Then she lifted her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite simply, "I haven't anything."

He suddenly remembered things his Mother had told him about poor people. Perhaps she was poor. Could she be poor when her frock and hat and coat were so pretty? It was not polite to ask. But the thought made him love her more. He felt something warm rush all over his body. The truth, if he had been old enough to be aware of it, was that the entire simpleness of her acceptance of things as they were, and a something which was unconsciousness of any cause for complaint, moved his child masculinity enormously. His old nurse's voice came from her corner again.

"I must go to Nanny," he said, feeling somehow as if he had been running fast. "I'll come tomorrow and bring two picture books."

He was a loving, warm blooded child human thing, and the expression of affection was, to him, a familiar natural impulse. He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her full on her mouth, as he embraced her with all his strength. He kissed her twice.

It was the first time for Robin. Andrews did not kiss. There was no one else. It was the first time, and Nature had also made her a loving, warm blooded, human thing. How beautiful he was—how big—how strong his arms were—and how soft and warm his mouth felt. She stood and gazed at him with wide asking eyes and laughed a little. She had no words because she did not know what had happened.

"Don't you like to be kissed?" said Donal, uncertain because she looked so startled and had not kissed him back.

"Kissed," she repeated, with a small, caught breath, "ye-es." She knew now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted up her face as sweetly and gladly, as a flower lifts itself to the sun. "Kiss me again," she said quite eagerly. As ingenuously and heartily as before, he kissed her again and, this time, she kissed too. When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling, trembling lips, uplifted, joyful—wondering and amazed.



CHAPTER VIII



When she went back to Andrews she carried the pricked leaves with her. She could not have left them behind. From what source she had drawn a characterizing passionate, though silent, strength of mind and body, it would be difficult to explain. Her mind and her emotions had been left utterly unfed, but they were not of the inert order which scarcely needs feeding. Her feeling for the sparrows had held more than she could have expressed; her secret adoration of the "Lady Downstairs" was an intense thing. Her immediate surrender to the desire in the first pair of human eyes—child eyes though they were—which had ever called to her being for response, was simple and undiluted rapture. She had passed over her little soul without a moment's delay and without any knowledge of the giving. It had flown from her as a bird might fly from darkness into the sun. Eight-year-old Donal was the sun.

No special tendency to innate duplicity was denoted by the fact that she had acquired, through her observation of Andrews, Jennings, Jane and Mrs. Blayne, the knowledge that there were things it was best not to let other people know. You were careful about them. From the occult communications between herself and Donal, which had resulted in their intrigue, there had of course evolved a realizing sense of the value of discretion. She did not let Andrews see the decorated leaves, but put them into a small pocket in her coat. Her Machiavellian intention was to slip them out when she was taken up to the Nursery. Andrews was always in a hurry to go downstairs to her lunch and she would be left alone and could find a place where she could hide them.

Andrews' friend started when Robin drew near to them. The child's cheeks and lips were the colour of Jacqueminot rose petals. Her eyes glowed with actual rapture.

"My word! That's a beauty if I ever saw one," said the woman. "First sight makes you jump. My word!"

Robin, however, did not know what she was talking about and in fact scarcely heard her. She was thinking of Donal. She thought of him as she was taken home, and she did not cease thinking of him during the whole rest of the day and far into the night. When Andrews left her, she found a place to hide the pricked leaves and before she put them away she did what Donal had done to her—she kissed them. She kissed them several times because they were Donal's leaves and he had made the stars and lines on them. It was almost like kissing Donal but not quite so beautiful.

After she was put to bed at night and Andrews left her she lay awake for a long time. She did not want to go to sleep because everything seemed so warm and wonderful and she could think and think and think. What she thought about was Donal's face, his delightful eyes, his white forehead with curly hair pushed back with his Highland bonnet. His plaid swung about when he ran and jumped. When he held her tight the buttons of his jacket hurt her a little because they pressed against her body. What was "Mother" like? Did he kiss her? What pretty stones there were in his clasps and buckles! How nice it was to hear him laugh and how fond he was of laughing. Donal! Donal! Donal! He liked to play with her though she was a girl and so little. He would play with her tomorrow. His cheeks were bright pink, his hair was bright, his eyes were bright. He was all bright. She tried to see into the blueness of his eyes again as it seemed when they looked at each other close to. As she began to see the clear colour she fell asleep.

The power which had on the first morning guided Robin to the seclusion behind the clump of shrubs and had provided Andrews with an enthralling companion, extended, the next day, an even more beneficient and complete protection. Andrews was smitten with a cold so alarming as to confine her to bed. Having no intention of running any risks, whatsoever, she promptly sent for a younger sister who, temporarily being "out of place", came into the house as substitute. She was a pretty young woman who assumed no special responsibilities and was fond of reading novels.

"She's been trained to be no trouble, Anne. She'll amuse herself without bothering you as long as you keep her out," Andrews said of Robin.

Anne took "Lady Audley's Secret" with her to the Gardens and, having led her charge to a shady and comfortable seat which exactly suited her, she settled herself for a pleasant morning.

"Now, you can play while I read," she said to Robin.

As they had entered the Gardens they had passed, not far from the gate, a bench on which sat a highly respectable looking woman who was hemming a delicate bit of cambric, and evidently in charge of two picture books which lay on the seat beside her. A fine boy in Highland kilts was playing a few yards away. Robin felt something like a warm flood rush over her and her joy was so great and exquisite that she wondered if Anne felt her hand trembling. Anne did not because she was looking at a lady getting into a carriage across the street.

The marvel of that early summer morning in the gardens of a splendid but dingy London square thing was not a thing for which human words could find expression. It was not an earthly thing, or, at least, not a thing belonging to an earth grown old. A child Adam and Eve might have known something like it in the Garden of Eden. It was as clear and simple as spring water and as warm as the sun.

Anne's permission to "play" once given, Robin found her way behind the group of lilacs and snowballs. Donal would come, not only because he was so big that Nanny would let him do what he wanted to do, but because he would do everything and anything in the world. Donal! Donal! Her heart was a mere baby's heart but it beat as if she were seventeen—beat with pure rapture. He was all bright and he would laugh and laugh.

The coming was easy enough for Donal. He had told his mother and Nanny rejoicingly about the little girl he had made friends with and who had no picture books. But he did not come straight to her. He took his picture books under his arm, and showing all his white teeth in a joyous grin, set out to begin their play properly with a surprise. He did not let her see him coming but "stalked" her behind the trees and bushes until he found where she was waiting, and then thrust his face between the branches of a tall shrub near her and laughed the outright laugh she loved. And when she turned she was looking straight into the clear blue she had tried to see when she fell asleep. "Donal! Donal!" she cried like a little bird with but one note.

The lilac and the snowball were in blossom and there was a big hawthorn tree which smelt sweet and sweet. They could not see the drift of smuts on the blossoms, they only smelled the sweetness and sat under the hawthorn and sniffed and sniffed. The sun was deliciously warm and a piano organ was playing beautifully not far away. They sat close to each other, so close that the picture book could lie open on both pairs of knees and the warmth of each young body penetrated the softness of the other. Sometimes Donal threw an arm around her as she bent over the page. Love and caresses were not amazements to him; he accepted them as parts of the normal joy of life. To Robin they were absolute wonder. The pictures were delight and amazement in one. Donal knew all about them and told her stories. She felt that such splendour could have emanated only from him. It could not occur to her that he had not invented them and made the pictures. He showed her Robinson Crusoe and Robin Hood. The scent of the hawthorn and lilac intoxicated them and they laughed tremendously because Robin Hood's name was like Robin's own and he was a man and she was a girl. They could scarcely stop laughing and Donal rolled over and over on the grass, half from unconquerable high spirits and half to make Robin laugh still more.

He had some beautiful coloured glass marbles in his pocket and he showed her how to play with them, and gave her two of the prettiest. He could shoot them over the ground in a way to thrill the beholder. He could hop on one leg as far as he liked. He could read out of books.

"Do you like me?" he said once in a pause between displays of his prowess.

Robin was kneeling upon the grass watching him and she clasped her little hands as if she were uttering a prayer.

"Oh, yes, yes!" she yearned. "Yes! Yes!"

"I like you," he answered; "I told my mother all about you."

He came to her and knelt by her side.

"Have you a mother?" he asked.

"No," shaking her head.

"Do you live with your aunt?"

"No, I don't live with anybody."

He looked puzzled.

"Isn't there any lady in your house?" he put it to her. She brightened a little, relieved to think she had something to tell him.

"There's the Lady Downstairs," she said. "She's so pretty—so pretty."

"Is she——" he stopped and shook his head. "She couldn't be your mother," he corrected himself. "You'd know about HER."

"She wears pretty clothes. Sometimes they float about and sparkle and she wears little crowns on her head—or flowers. She laughs," Robin described eagerly. "A great many people come to see her. They all laugh. Sometimes they sing. I lie in bed and listen."

"Does she ever come upstairs to the Nursery?" inquired Donal with a somewhat reflective air.

"Yes. She comes and stands near the door and says, 'Is she quite well, Andrews?' She does not laugh then. She—she LOOKS at me."

She stopped there, feeling suddenly that she wished very much that she had more to tell. What she was saying was evidently not very satisfactory. He seemed to expect more—and she had no more to give. A sense of emptiness crept upon her and for no reason she understood there was a little click in her throat.

"Does she only stand near the door?" he suggested, as one putting the situation to a sort of crucial test. "Does she never sit on a big chair and take you on her knee?"

"No, no," in a dropped voice. "She will not sit down. She says the chairs are grubby."

"Doesn't she LOVE you at all?" persisted Donal. "Doesn't she KISS you?"

There was a thing she had known for what seemed to her a long time—God knows in what mysterious fashion she had learned it, but learned it well she had. That no human being but herself was aware of her knowledge was inevitable. To whom could she have told it? But Donal—Donal wanted to know all about her. The little click made itself felt in her throat again.

"She—she doesn't LIKE me!" Her dropped voice was the whisper of one humbled to the dust by confession, "She—doesn't LIKE me!" And the click became another thing which made her put up her arm over her eyes—her round, troubled child eyes, which, as she had looked into Donal's, had widened with sudden, bewildered tears.

Donal flung his arms round her and squeezed his buttons into her tender chest. He hugged her close; he kissed her; there was a choking in his throat. He was hot all over.

"She does like you. She must like you. I'll make her!" he cried passionately. "She's not your mother. If she was, she'd LOVE you! She'd LOVE you!"

"Do Mothers l-love you?" the small voice asked with a half sob. "What's—what's LOVE you?" It was not vulgar curiosity. She only wanted to find out.

He loosed his embrace, sitting back on his heels to stare.

"Don't you KNOW?"

She shook her head with soft meekness.

"N-no," she answered.

Big boys like himself did not usually play with such little girls. But something had drawn him to her at their first moment of encounter. She wasn't like any other little girls. He felt it all the time and that was part of the thing which drew him. He was not, of course, aware that the male thrill at being regarded as one who is a god had its power over the emotions. She wasn't making silly fun and pretending. She really didn't know—because she was different.

"It's liking very much. It's more," he explained. "My mother loves ME. I—I LOVE you!" stoutly. "Yes, I LOVE you. That's why I kissed you when you cried."

She was so uplifted, so overwhelmed with adoring gratitude that as she knelt on the grass she worshipped him.

"I love YOU," she answered him. "I LOVE you—LOVE you!" And she looked at him with such actual prayerfulness that he caught at her and, with manly promptness, kissed her again-this being mere Nature.

Because he was eight years old and she was six her tears flashed away and they both laughed joyously as they sat down on the grass again to talk it over.

He told her all the pleasant things he knew about Mothers. The world was full of them it seemed—full. You belong to them from the time you were a baby. He had not known many personally because he had always lived at Braemarnie, which was in the country in Scotland. There were no houses near his home. You had to drive miles and miles before you came to a house or a castle. He had not seen much of other children except a few who lived at the Manse and belonged to the minister. Children had fathers as well as mothers. Fathers did not love you or take care of you quite as much as Mothers—because they were men. But they loved you too. His own father had died when he was a baby. His mother loved him as much as he loved her. She was beautiful but—it seemed to reveal itself—not like the Lady Downstairs. She did not laugh very much, though she laughed when they played together. He was too big now to sit on her knee, but squeezed into the big chair beside her when she read or told him stories. He always did what his mother told him. She knew everything in the world and so knew what he ought to do. Even when he was a big man he should do what his mother told him.

Robin listened to every word with enraptured eyes and bated breath. This was the story of Love and Life and it was the first time she had ever heard it. It was as much a revelation as the Kiss. She had spent her days in the grimy Nursery and her one close intimate had been a bony woman who had taught her not to cry, employing the practical method of terrifying her into silence by pinching her—knowing it was quite safe to do it. It had not been necessary to do it often. She had seen people on the streets, but she had only seen them in passing by. She had not watched them as she had watched the sparrows. When she was taken down for a few minutes into the basement, she vaguely knew that she was in the way and that Mrs. Blayne's and Andrews' and Jennings' low voices and occasional sidelong look meant that they were talking about her and did not want her to hear.

"I have no mother and no father," she explained quite simply to Donal. "No one kisses me."

"No one!" Donal said, feeling curious. "Has no one ever kissed you but me?"

"No," she answered.

Donal laughed—because children always laugh when they do not know what else to do.

"Was that why you looked as if you were frightened when I said good-bye to you yesterday?"

"I-I didn't know," said Robin, laughing a little too—but not very much, "I wasn't frightened. I liked you."

"I'll kiss you as often as you want me to," he volunteered nobly. "I'm used to it—because of my mother. I'll kiss you again now." And he did it quite without embarrassment. It was a sort of manly gratuity.

Once Anne, with her book in her hand, came round the shrubs to see how her charge was employing herself, and seeing her looking at pictures with a handsomely dressed companion, she returned to "Lady Audley's Secret" feeling entirely safe.

The lilac and the hawthorn tree continued to breathe forth warmed scents of paradise in the sunshine, the piano organ went on playing, sometimes nearer, sometimes farther away, but evidently finding the neighbourhood a desirable one. Sometimes the children laughed at each other, sometimes at pictures Donal showed, or stories he told, or at his own extreme wit. The boundaries were removed from Robin's world. She began to understand that there was another larger one containing wonderful and delightful things she had known nothing about. Donal was revealing it to her in everything he said even when he was not aware that he was telling her anything. When Eve was formed from the rib of Adam the information it was necessary for him to give her regarding her surroundings must have filled her with enthralling interest and a reverence which adored. The planted enclosure which was the central feature of the soot sprinkled, stately London Square was as the Garden of Eden.

* * * * *

The Garden of Eden it remained for two weeks. Andrews' cold was serious enough to require a doctor and her sister Anne continued to perform their duties. The weather was exceptionally fine and, being a vain young woman, she liked to dress Robin in her pretty clothes and take her out because she was a beauty and attracted attention to her nurse as well as to herself. Mornings spent under the trees reading were entirely satisfactory. Each morning the children played together and each night Robin lay awake and lived again the delights of the past hours. Each day she learned more wonders and her young mind and soul were fed. There began to stir in her brain new thoughts and the beginning of questioning. Scotland, Braemarnie, Donal's mother, even the Manse and the children in it, combined to form a world of enchantment. There were hills with stags living in them, there were moors with purple heather and yellow brome and gorse; birds built their nests under the bushes and Donal's pony knew exactly where to step even in the roughest places. There were two boys and two girls at the Manse and they had a father and a mother. These things were enough for a new heaven and a new earth to form themselves around. The centre of the whole Universe was Donal with his strength and his laugh and his eyes which were so alive and glowing that she seemed always to see them. She knew nothing about the thing which was their somehow—not-to-be-denied allure. They were ASKING eyes—and eyes which gave. The boy was in truth a splendid creature. His body and beauty were perfect life and joyous perfect living. His eyes asked other eyes for everything. "Tell me more," they said. "Tell me more! Like me! Answer me! Let us give each other everything in the world." He had always been well, he had always been happy, he had always been praised and loved. He had known no other things.

During the first week in which the two children played together, his mother, whose intense desire it was to understand him, observed in him a certain absorption of mood when he was not talking or amusing himself actively. He began to fall into a habit of standing at the windows, often with his chin in his hand, looking out as if he were so full of thought that he saw nothing. It was not an old habit, it was a new one.

"What are you thinking about, Donal?" she asked one afternoon.

He seemed to awaken, as it were, when he heard her. He turned about with his alluring smile.

"I am thinking it is FUNNY," he said. "It is funny that I should like such a little girl such a lot. She is years and years younger than I am. But I like her so. It is such fun to tell her things." He marched over to his mother's writing table and leaned against it. What his mother saw was that he had an impassioned desire to talk about this child. She felt it was a desire even a trifle abnormal in its eagerness.

"She has such a queer house, I think," he explained. "She has a nurse and such pretty clothes and she is so pretty herself, but I don't believe she has any toys or books in her nursery."

"Where is her mother?"

"She must be dead. There is no lady in her house but the Lady Downstairs. She is very pretty and is always laughing. But she is not her mother because she doesn't like her and she never kisses her. I think that's the queerest thing of all. No one had EVER kissed her till I did."

His mother was a woman given to psychological analysis. Her eyes began to dwell on his face with slightly anxious questioning.

"Did you kiss her?" she inquired.

"Yes. I kissed her when I said good morning the first day. I thought she didn't like me to do it but she did. It was only because no one had ever done it before. She likes it very much."

He leaned farther over the writing table and began to pour forth, his smile growing and his eyes full of pleasure. His mother was a trifle alarmedly struck by the feeling that he was talking like a young man in love who cannot keep his tongue still, though in his case even the youngest manhood was years away, and he made no effort to conceal his sentiments which a young man would certainly have striven to do.

"She's got such a pretty little face and such a pretty mouth and cheeks," he touched a Jacqueminot rose in a vase. "They are the colour of that. Today a robin came with the sparrows and hopped about near us. We laughed and laughed because her eyes are like the robin's, and she is called Robin. I wish you would come into the Gardens and see her, mother. She likes everything I do."

"I must come, dear," she answered.

"Nanny thinks she is lovely," he announced. "She says I am in love with her. Am I, mother?"

"You are too young to be in love," she said. "And even when you are older you must not fall in love with people you know nothing about."

It was an unconscious bit of Scotch cautiousness which she at once realized was absurd and quite out of place. But—!

She realized it because he stood up and squared his shoulders in an odd young-mannish way. He had not flushed even faintly before and now a touch of colour crept under his fair skin.

"But I DO love her," he said. "I DO. I can't stop." And though he was quite simple and obviously little boy-like, she actually felt frightened for a moment.



CHAPTER IX



On the afternoon of the day upon which this occurred, Coombe was standing in Feather's drawing-room with a cup of tea in his hand and wearing the look of a man who is given up to reflection.

"I saw Mrs. Muir today for the first time for several years," he said after a silence. "She is in London with the boy."

"Is she as handsome as ever?"

"Quite. Hers is not the beauty that disappears. It is line and bearing and a sort of splendid grace and harmony."

"What is the boy like?"

Coombe reflected again before he answered.

"He is—amazing. One so seldom sees anything approaching physical perfection that it strikes one a sort of blow when one comes upon it suddenly face to face."

"Is he as beautiful as all that?"

"The Greeks used to make statues of bodies like his. They often called them gods—but not always. The Creative Intention plainly was that all human beings should be beautiful and he is the expression of it."

Feather was pretending to embroider a pink flower on a bit of gauze and she smiled vaguely.

"I don't know what you mean," she admitted with no abasement of spirit, "but if ever there was any Intention of that kind it has not been carried out." Her smile broke into a little laugh as she stuck her needle into her work. "I'm thinking of Henry," she let drop in addition.

"So was I, it happened," answered Coombe after a second or so of pause.

Henry was the next of kin who was—to Coombe's great objection—his heir presumptive, and was universally admitted to be a repulsive sort of person both physically and morally. He had brought into the world a weakly and rickety framework and had from mere boyhood devoted himself to a life which would have undermined a Hercules. A relative may so easily present the aspect of an unfortunate incident over which one has no control. This was the case with Henry. His character and appearance were such that even his connection with an important heritage was not enough to induce respectable persons to accept him in any form. But if Coombe remained without issue Henry would be the Head of the House.

"How is his cough?" inquired Feather.

"Frightful. He is an emaciated wreck and he has no physical cause for remaining alive."

Feather made three or four stitches.

"Does Mrs. Muir know?" she said.

"If Mrs. Muir is conscious of his miserable existence, that is all," he answered. "She is not the woman to inquire. Of course she cannot help knowing that—when he is done with—her boy takes his place in the line of succession."

"Oh, yes, she'd know that," put in Feather.

It was Coombe who smiled now—very faintly.

"You have a mistaken view of her," he said.

"You admire her very much," Feather bridled. The figure of this big Scotch creature with her "line" and her "splendid grace and harmony" was enough to make one bridle.

"She doesn't admire me," said Coombe. "She is not proud of me as a connection. She doesn't really want the position for the boy, in her heart of hearts."

"Doesn't want it!" Feather's exclamation was a little jeer only because she would not have dared a big one.

"She is Scotch Early Victorian in some things and extremely advanced in others," he went on. "She has strong ideas of her own as to how he shall be brought up. She's rather Greek in her feeling for his being as perfect physically and mentally as she can help him to be. She believes things. It was she who said what you did not understand—about the Creative Intention."

"I suppose she is religious," Feather said. "Scotch people often are but their religion isn't usually like that. Creative Intention's a new name for God, I suppose. I ought to know all about God. I've heard enough about Him. My father was not a clergyman but he was very miserable, and it made him so religious that he was ALMOST one. We were every one of us christened and catechized and confirmed and all that. So God's rather an old story."

"Queer how old—from Greenland's icy mountains to India's coral strand," said Coombe. "It's an ancient search—that for the Idea—whether it takes form in metal or wood or stone."

"Well," said Feather, holding her bit of gauze away from her the better to criticize the pink flower. "As ALMOST a clergyman's daughter I must say that if there is one tiling God didn't do, it was to fill the world with beautiful people and things as if it was only to be happy in. It was made to-to try us by suffering and-that sort of thing. It's a-a-what d'ye call it? Something beginning with P."

"Probation," suggested Coombe regarding her with an expression of speculative interest. Her airy bringing forth of her glib time-worn little scraps of orthodoxy—as one who fished them out of a bag of long-discarded remnants of rubbish—was so true to type that it almost fascinated him for a moment.

"Yes. That's it—probation," she answered. "I knew it began with a P. It means 'thorny paths' and 'seas of blood' and, if you are religious, you 'tread them with bleeding feet—' or swim them as the people do in hymns. And you praise and glorify all the time you're doing it. Of course, I'm not religious myself and I can't say I think it's pleasant—but I do KNOW! Every body beautiful and perfect indeed! That's not religion—it's being irreligious. Good gracious, think of the cripples and lepers and hunchbacks!"

"And the idea is that God made them all—by way of entertaining himself?" he put it to her quietly.

"Well, who else did?" said Feather cheerfully.

"I don't know," he said. "Certain things I heard Mrs. Muir say suggested to one that it might be interesting to think it out."

"Did she talk to you about God at afternoon tea?" said Feather. "It's the kind of thing a religious Scotch woman might do."

"No, she did not talk to me. Perhaps that was her mistake. She might have reformed me. She never says more to me than civility demands. And it was not at tea. I accidentally dropped in on the Bethunes and found an Oriental had been lecturing there. Mrs. Muir was talking to him and I heard her. The man seemed to be a scholar and a deep thinker and as they talked a group of us stood and listened or asked questions."

"How funny!" said Feather.

"It was not funny at all. It was astonishingly calm and serious—and logical. The logic was the new note. I had never thought of reason in that connection."

"Reason has nothing to do with it. You must have faith. You must just believe what you're told not think at all. Thinking is wickedness—unless you think what you hear preached." Feather was even a trifle delicately smug as she rattled off her orthodoxy—but she laughed after she had done with it. "But it MUST have been funny—a Turk or a Hindoo in a turban and a thing like a tea gown and Mrs. Muir in her Edinburgh looking clothes talking about God."

"You are quite out of it," Coombe did not smile at all as he said it. "The Oriental was as physically beautiful as Donal Muir is. And Mrs. Muir—no other woman in the room compared with her. Perhaps people who think grow beautiful."

Feather was not often alluring or coquettish in her manner to Coombe but she tilted her head prettily and looked down at her flower through lovely lashes.

"I don't think," she said. "And I am not so bad looking."

"No," he answered coldly. "You are not. At times you look like a young angel."

"If Mrs. Muir is like that," she said after a brief pause, "I should like to know what she thinks of me?"

"No, you would not—neither should I—if she thinks at all," was his answer. "But you remember you said you did not mind that sort of thing."

"I don't. Why should I? It can't harm me." Her hint of a pout made her mouth entrancing. "But, if she thinks good looks are the result of religiousness I should like to let her see Robin—and compare her with her boy. I saw Robin in the park last week and she's a perfect beauty."

"Last week?" said Coombe.

"She doesn't need anyone but Andrews. I should bore her to death if I went and sat in the Nursery and stared at her. No one does that sort of thing in these days. But I should like to see Mrs. Muir to see the two children together!" "That could not easily be arranged, I am afraid," he said.

"Why not?"

His answer was politely deliberate.

"She greatly disapproves of me, I have told you. She is not proud of the relationship."

"She does not like ME you mean?"