utterance trailed off into an unintelligible murmur in his
throat and he became silent.

Mrs. Rickett shook out a small damp garment, and spread it upon the table
with care. "I don't see how anyone is to say as she won't come back," she
said. "Of course I know she's a lady born, but that don't prevent her
making friends among humbler folk. She's talked of this place more than
once as if she'd like to settle here."

"She won't then!" growled Robin. "She'll never do that, not
while--." Again he became inarticulate, muttering deeply in his throat
like an animal goaded to savagery.

Mrs. Rickett turned from her ironing to regard him. She had never found
Robin hard to understand before, but there was something about him to-day
which was wholly beyond her comprehension. He was like some wild creature
that had received a cruel wound. Dumb resentment and fiery suffering
seemed to mingle in his half uttered sentences. As he sat there, huddled
forward with his hands pathetically clenched she thought she had never
seen a more piteous sight.

"Lor', Robin, my dear!" she said. "What ever makes you know such a lot?
Why shouldn't she come back then? Tell me that!"

He shook his shaggy head, but more in protest than refusal.

Mrs. Rickett bent down over him, her kindly red face full of the most
motherly concern.

"What's troubling you, Robin?" she said. "You aren't--fretting for
her, are you?"

He threw her one of his wild, furtive looks, and again in his eyes she
caught a glimpse of something that deeply moved her. She laid a
comforting hand on his shoulder.

"Is that it, lad? Are you wanting her? Ah, don't fret then--don't fret!
She'll surely come back--some day."

The boy's face quivered. He looked down at his clenched hands, and at
length jerkily, laboriously, he spoke, giving difficult and bitter
utterance to the trouble that gnawed at his heart.

"It's--Dicky that wants her. But she won't come--she won't come--while
I'm here." A sudden hard shiver went through him, he drew his breath
through his set teeth, with a desperate sound. "No woman would," he said
with hard despair.

And then abruptly, as if with speech his misery had become unendurable,
he blundered to his feet with outflung arms, making the only outcry
against fate that his poor stunted brain had ever accomplished. "It isn't
fair!" he wailed. "It isn't right! I'm going to God--to tell Him so!"

He turned with the words, the impulse of the stricken creatu