in a moment
he had broken down altogether and hid his head in the arm of the chair,
sobbing as if his heart would break.

Harry waited. The moment for which he had longed so passionately had
come at last; all those weary weeks had now received their reward. But
he was very tired and he could not remember anything except that his
boy was there and that he was crying and wanted some one to help
him--which was very sentimental.

He got up from his chair and put his hand on Robin's shoulder.

"Robin, old boy--don't; it's all right really. I've been waiting for
you to come and speak to me; of course, I knew that you would come.
Never mind about those other things--we're going to have a splendid
time, you and I."

He put his arm round him. There was a moment's silence, then the boy
turned round and gripped his father's coat--then he buried his head in
his father's knees.

Benham entered half an hour later with Harry's evening meal.

"I will have mine here, too, Benham," said Robin, "with my father."

"There is one thing, Robin," said Harry a little later, laughing--"what
about the letters?"

"Oh, I know!" Robin looked up at his father appealingly. "I don't
know what you must think of me over that business. But I suppose I
believed for a time in it all, and then when I saw that it wouldn't do
I just wanted to get out of it as quickly as I could. I never seem to
have thought about it at all--and now I'm more ashamed than I can say.
But I think I'll go through with it; I don't see that there's anything
else very much for me to do, any other way of making up--I think I'd
rather face it."

"Would you?" said Harry. "What about your friends and the House?"

Robin flinched for a moment; then he said resolutely, "Yes, it would be
better for them too. You see they know already--the House, I mean.
All the chaps in the dining-hall and the picture-gallery, they've known
about it all day, and I know that they'd rather I didn't back out of
it. Besides--" he hesitated a moment. "There's another thing--I have
the kind of feeling that I can't have hurt Dahlia so very much if she's
the kind of girl to carry that sort of thing through; if, I mean, she
takes it like that she isn't the sort of girl that would mind very much
what I had done----"

"Is she," said Harry, "that sort of girl?"

"No, I don't think she is. That's what's puzzled me about it all. She
was worth twenty of me really. But any decent sort of girl