Feather was guilelessly doubtless concerning him. She was quite sure that he was in love with her, and very practically aware that the more men of the class of the Head of the House of Coombe who came in and out of the slice of a house, the more likely the dwellers in it were to get good invitations and continued credit.

The realisation of these benefits was cut short. Robert, amazingly and unnaturally, failed her by dying. He was sent away in a hearse and the tiny house ceased to represent hilarious little parties.

Bills were piled high everywhere. The rent was long overdue and must be paid. She had no money to pay it, none to pay the servants’ wages.

“It’s awful—it’s awful—it’s awful!” broke out between her sobs.

From her bedroom window—at evening—she watched “Cook,” the smart footman, the nurse, the maids, climb into four-wheelers and be driven away.

“They’re gone—all of them!” she gasped. “There’s no one left in the house. It’s empty!”

Then was Feather seized with a panic. She had something like hysterics, falling face downward upon the carpet and clutching her hair until it fell down. She was not a person to be judged—she was one of the unexplained incidents of existence.

The night drew in more closely. A prolonged wailing shriek tore through the utter soundlessness of the house. It came from the night-nursery. It was Robin who had wakened and was screaming.

“I—I won’t!” Feather protested, with chattering teeth. “I won’t! I won’t!”

She had never done anything for the child since its birth. To reach her now, she would be obliged to go out into the dark—past Robert’s bedroom—the room.

“I—I couldn’t—even if I wanted to!” she quaked. “I daren’t! I daren’t! I wouldn’t do it—for a million pounds!”

The screams took on a more determined note. She flung herself on her bed, burrowing her head under the coverings and pillows she dragged over her ears to shut out the sounds.

Feather herself had not known, nor in fact had any other human being known why Lord Coombe drifted into seeming rather to follow her about. But there existed a reason, and this it was, and this alone, which caused him to appear—the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form—at her door.

He listened while she poured it all forth, sobbing. Her pretty hair loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

“I would do anything—any one asked me, if they would take care of me.”

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.

“Do I understand,” he said, “that you are willing that I should arrange this for you?”

“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.

The florist came and refilled the window-boxes of the slice of a house with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers. It became an established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces, and its frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing, indeed, the air of people who had never really remained away from it.

As a bird in captivity lives in its cage and, perhaps, believes it to be the world, Robin lived in her nursery. She was put to bed and taken up, she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day she was taken out of it downstairs and into the street. That was all.

It is a somewhat portentous thing to realise that a newborn human creature can only know what it is taught. To Robin the Lady Downstairs was merely a radiant and beautiful being of whom one might catch a glimpse through a door, or if one pressed one’s face against the window pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little questions put to her.

So she remained unaware of mothers and unaware of affection. She never played with other children. Andrews, her nurse—as behooved one employed in a house about which there “was talk” bore herself with a lofty and exclusive air.

“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.”

But one morning, when Robin was watching some quarrelsome sparrows, an old acquaintance surprised Andrews by appearing in the Gardens and engaged her in a conversation so delightful that Robin was forgotten to the extent of being allowed to follow her sparrows round a clump of shrubbery out of sight.

It was while she watched them that she heard footsteps that stopped near her. She looked up. A big boy in Highland kilts and bonnet and sporran was standing by her.