f saying anything like this. And she certainly
had not known that she would suddenly find herself overwhelmed by a
rising tidal wave of unbearable woe and drop her face on to the old
woman's lap with wild sobbing. She had not come down from London to do
this--but away from the world--in the clean, still little cottage room
which seemed to hold only grief and silence and death the wave rose and
broke and swept her with it.

Mrs. Bennett only gave herself up to the small clutching hands and sat
and shivered.

"No one--will come in--will they?" Robin was gasping. "There is no one
to hear, is there?"

"No one on earth," said the old fairy woman. "Quiet and loneliness are
left if there's naught else."

What she thought it would be hard to say. The blow which had come to her
at the end of a long life had, as it were, felled her as a tree might
have been felled in Mersham Wood. As the tree might have lain for a
short time with its leaves still seeming alive on its branches so she
seemed living. But she had been severed from her root. She listened to
the girl's sobbing and stroked her hair.

"Don't be afraid. There's no one left to hear but the walls and the bare
trees in the wood," she said.

Robin sobbed on.

"You've a kind heart, but you're not crying for me," she said next.
"You've a black trouble of your own. There's few that hasn't these days.
And it's worse for the young that's got to live through it and after it.
When Mary Ann comes to see after me to-morrow morning I may be lying
dead, thank God. But you're a child." The small clutching hands clutched
more piteously because it was so true--so true. Whatsoever befell there
were all the long, long years to come--with only the secret left and the
awful fear that sometime she might begin to be afraid that it was not a
real thing--since no one had ever known or ever would know and since she
could never speak of it or hear it spoken of.

"I'm so afraid," she shuddered at last in a small low voice. "I'm so
_lonely_!" The old fairy woman's stroking hand stopped short.

"Is there--anything--you'd like to tell me--anything in the world?" she
asked tremulously. "There's nothing I'd mind."

The pretty head on her lap shook itself to and fro.

"No! No! No! No!" the small choked voice gave out. "Nothing--nothing!
Nothing. That's why it's so lonely."

As she had waited alone through the night in her cradle, as she had
watched the sparrows on the roofs above her in the