"'May I venture to remind you,' he says--like a little thin edge of something, paper, maybe, that's smooth as silk, but that'll cut neat and deep if you let it--'May I venture to remind you that your aunt is announcing our engagement to-night? I think that will have escaped your mind.' "'Yes,' Robin says, simple, 'it had. Everything had escaped my mind except this poor little thing here. Alex--it's early. He'll sleep after a little. But I must go down with him. What did you come in?' she asked Insley, quiet. "I told her I'd go down, and she nodded that I was to go, but Chris clung to her hand and it was her that he wanted, poor little soul, and only her. Insley had come up in the doctor's rig. She and I would join him with the child, she told him, at the side entrance and almost at once. There was voices in the house by then, and some of the young folks was coming downstairs and up from the tennis-court for tea. She went into the house with Chris. And I wondered if she thought of the thing I thought of and that made me glad and glad that there are such men in the world: Not once, not once, out of some felt-he-must courtesy, had Insley begged her not to go with him. He knew that she was needed down there with Chris and him and me--he knew, and he wouldn't say she wasn't. Land, land I love a man that don't talk with the outside of his head and let what he means lay cramped somewheres underneath, but that reaches down and gets up what he means, and holds it out, for you to take or to leave. "Mis' Emmons was overseeing the decorations in the dining room. The whole evening party she had got right over onto her shoulders the way she does everything, and down to counting the plates she was seeing to it all. We found her and told her, and her pity went to the poor fellow down there at the Cadozas' almost before it went to Chris. "'Go, of course,' she said. 'I suppose Alex minds, but leave him to me. I've got to be here--but it's not I Chris wants in any case. It's you. Get back as soon as you can, Robin.'