le silence, a delicate little silence.

"I recognized you as Mrs. Muir at once," added Feather, unperturbed and
smiling brilliantly. "I saw your portrait at the Grovenor."

"Yes," said Mrs. Muir, gently.

"I wanted very much to see your son; that was why I came."

"Yes," still gently from Mrs. Muir.

"Because of Coombe, you know. We are such old friends. How queer that
the two little things have made friends too. I didn't know."

She bade them good-bye and strayed airily away.

And that night Donal was awakened, was told that "something" had
happened, that they were to go back to Scotland. He was accustomed to do
as he was told. He got out of bed and began to dress, but he swallowed
very hard.

"I shall not see Robin," he said in a queer voice. "She won't find me
when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won't know why I don't come."
Then, in a way that was strangely grown up: "She has no one but me to
remember."

* * * * *

The next morning a small, rose-coloured figure stood still for so long
in the gardens that it began to look rigid and some one said, "I wonder
what that little girl is waiting for."

A child has no words out of which to build hopes and fears. Robin could
only wait in the midst of a slow dark rising tide of something she had
no name for. Suddenly she knew. He was _gone_! She crept under the
shrubbery. She cried, she sobbed. If Andrews had seen her she would have
said she was "in a tantrum." But she was not. Her world had been torn
away.

* * * * *

Five weeks later Feather was giving a very little dinner in the slice of
a house. There was Harrowby, a good looking young man with dark eyes,
and the Starling who was "emancipated" and whose real name was Miss
March. The third diner was a young actor with a low, veiled
voice--Gerald Vesey--who adored and understood Feather's clothes.

Over coffee in the drawing-room Coombe joined them just at the moment
that Feather was "going to tell them something to make them laugh."

"Robin is in love!" she cried. "She is five years old and she has been
deserted and Andrews came to tell me she can neither eat nor sleep. The
doctor says she has had a shock."

Coombe did not join in the ripple of laughter, but he looked interested.

"Robin is a stimulating name," said Harrowby. "_Is_ it too late to let
us see her?"

"They usually go to sleep at seven, I believe," remarked Coombe, "but o