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 of course I am not an authority.”

Robin was not asleep, though she had long been in bed with her eyes closed. She had heard Andrews say to her sister Anne:

“Lord Coombe’s the reason. She does not want her boy to see or speak to him, so she whisked him back to Scotland.”

“Is Lord Coombe as bad as they say?” put in Anne, with bated breath.

“As to his badness,” Robin heard Andrews answer, “there’s some that can’t say enough against him. It’s what he is in this house that does it. She won’t have her boy playing with a child like Robin.”

Then—even as there flashed upon Robin the revelation of her own unfitness—came a knock at the door.

She was taken up, dressed in her prettiest frock and led down the narrow stairway. She heard the Lady say:

“Shake hands with Lord Coombe.”

Robin put her hand behind her back—she who had never disobeyed since she was born!

“Be pretty mannered, Miss Robin my dear,” Andrews instructed, “and shake hands with his Lordship.”

Each person in the little drawing-room saw the queer flame in the child-face. She shrilled out her words:

“Andrews will pinch me—Andrews will pinch me! But—No—No!”

She kept her hands behind her back and hatred surged up in her soul.

In spite of her tender years, the doctor held to the theory that Robin had suffered a shock; she must be taken away to be helped by the bracing air of the Norfolk coast. Before she went, workmen were to be seen coming in and out of the house. When she returned to London, she was led into rooms she had never been in before—light and airy rooms with pretty walls and furniture.

It was “a whim of Coombe’s,” as Feather put it, that she should no longer occupy the little dog-kennels of nurseries, so these new apartments had been added in the rear. A whim of his also that Andrews, whose disciplinary methods included pinching, should be dismissed and replaced by Dowson, a motherly creature with a great deal of common sense. Robin’s lonely little heart opened to her new nurse, who became in time her “Dowie.”

It was Dowson who made it clear to Lord Coombe, at length, that Robin had reached the age when she needed a governess, and it was he who said to Feather a few days later:

“A governess will come here to-morrow at eleven o’clock. She is a Mademoiselle Vallé. She is accustomed to the education of young children. She will present herself for your approval.”

“What on earth can it matter?” Feather cried.

“It does not matter to you,” he answered. “It chances for the time being to matter to me.”

Mademoiselle Vallé was an intelligent, mature French woman, with a peculiar power to grasp an intricate situation. She learned to love the child she taught—a child so strangely alone. As time went on she came to know that Robin was to receive every educational advantage, every instruction. In his impersonal, aloof way Coombe was fixed in his intention to provide her with life’s defences. As she grew, graceful as a willow wand, into a girlhood startlingly lovely, she learned modern languages, learned to dance divinely.

And all the while he was deeply conscious that her infant hatred had not lessened—that he could show her no reason why it should.

There were black hours when she was in deadly peril from a human beast, mad with her beauty. Coombe had almost miraculously saved her, but her detestation of him still held.

Her one thought—her one hope—was to learn—learn, so that she might make her own living. Mademoiselle Vallé supported her in this, and Coombe understood.

In one of the older London squares there was a house upon the broad doorsteps of which Lord Coombe stood oftener than upon any other. The old Dowager Duchess of Darte, having surrounded herself with almost royal dignity, occupied that house in an enforced seclusion. She was a confirmed rheumatic invalid, but her soul was as strong as it was many years before, when she had given its support to Coombe in his unbearable hours.