She bade them good-bye and strayed airily away. And that night Donal was awakened, was told that "something" had happened, that they were to go back to Scotland. He was accustomed to do as he was told. He got out of bed and began to dress, but he swallowed very hard. "I shall not see Robin," he said in a queer voice. "She won't find me when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won't know why I don't come." Then, in a way that was strangely grown up: "She has no one but me to remember." * * * * * The next morning a small, rose-coloured figure stood still for so long in the gardens that it began to look rigid and some one said, "I wonder what that little girl is waiting for." A child has no words out of which to build hopes and fears. Robin could only wait in the midst of a slow dark rising tide of something she had no name for. Suddenly she knew. He was _gone_! She crept under the shrubbery. 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."