He spread and curved his red mouth, then began to run and prance round in a circle, capering like a Shetland pony to exhibit at once his friendliness and his prowess. After a minute or two he stopped, breathing fast and glowing.

“My pony in Scotland does that. His name is Chieftain. I’m called Donal. What are you called?”

“Robin,” she answered, her lips and voice trembling with joy. He was so beautiful.

They began to play together while Andrews’friend recounted intimate details of a country house scandal.

Donal picked leaves from a lilac bush. Robin learned that if you laid a leaf flat on the seat of a bench you could prick beautiful patterns on the leaf’s greenness. Donal had—in his rolled down stocking—a little dirk. He did the decoration with the point of this while Robin looked on, enthralled.

Through what means children so quickly convey to each other the entire history of their lives is a sort of occult secret. Before Donal was taken home, Robin knew that he lived in Scotland and had been brought to London on a visit, that his other name was Muir, that the person he called “mother” was a woman who took care of him. He spoke of her quite often.

“I will bring one of my picture-books to-morrow,” he said grandly. “Can you read at all?”

“No,” answered Robin, adoring him. “What are picture books?”

“Haven’t you any?” he blurted out.

She lifted her eyes to the glowing blueness of his and said quite simply, “I haven’t anything.”

His old nurse’s voice came from the corner where she sat.

“I must go back to Nanny,” he said, feeling, somehow, as if he had been running fast. “I’ll come to-morrow and bring two picture books.”

He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her full on the mouth. It was the first time, for Robin. Andrews did not kiss. There was no one else.

“Don’t you like to be kissed?” said Donal, uncertain because she looked so startled and had not kissed him back.

“Kissed,” she repeated, with a small caught breath. “Ye—es.” She knew now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted up her face as sweetly and gladly as a flower lifts itself to the sun. “Kiss me again,” she said, quite eagerly. And this time, she kissed too. When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling, trembling lips, uplifted, joyful—wondering and amazed.

The next morning Andrews had a cold and her younger sister Anne was called in to perform her duties. The doctor pronounced the cold serious, and Andrews was confined to her bed. Hours spent under the trees reading were entirely satisfactory to Anne. And so, for two weeks, the soot-sprinkled London square was as the Garden of Eden to Donal and Robin.

In her fine, aloof way, Helen Muir had learned much in her stays in London and during her married life—in the exploring of foreign cities with her husband. She was not proud of the fact that in the event of the death of Lord Coombe’s shattered and dissipated nephew her son would become heir presumptive to Coombe Court. She had not asked questions about Coombe. It had not been necessary. Once or twice she had seen Feather by chance.