"Yes, dear--of course." Helen Durkin glanced sharply at her husband as she spoke. The look in his eyes frightened her. There was satisfaction in his stare, but it was a cold, derisive kind of satisfaction with no warmth or sympathy radiating out from it. He was watching Emily as he might have watched a humming bird hovering over a cannibal plant, one of those horrible fly-trap things that grew in tropical jungles. What chance would the humming bird have against the sudden, cruel closing of the plant's spiked petals, its animal-like ferocity of purpose? An overpowering surge of terror swept over Durkin's wife, tightening the muscles of her throat. _Will, don't_--she wanted to scream. _Don't punish the children because you hate me. Or because you hate yourself. Don't, Will, please_-- Robert failed to notice the trembling of his mother's hands, failed even to observe that his stepfather had not budged an inch from his attitude of sharp-eyed observation. For a moment the adult world was blotted out for Robert--blotted out completely. He knelt and stared through the cottage window as his sister had done, resting his hand on the arching trellis. It was not a doll house to Robert. He took far too much pride in his budding masculinity to admit for an instant that he could be interested in a doll house. No--it was a cottage, small, white and very beautiful. He pictured himself as having a wife and children of his own and coming home every night to just such a cottage. "You look tired," his wife would say. "You'd better rest a bit--then we'll have dinner." He could picture himself going into the bathroom and turning on the hot water. Later he'd open the windows wide to the night air. He'd hear crickets chirping as the children clustered about him. But so complex and subtle are childhood identifications that he could also think of himself as still a boy, living with his sister in a cottage just as small, white and beautiful, but set adrift on a pirate-perilous sea remote from his stepfather's mockery. With a swift, defiant gesture Robert reached in through the window, and grasped the crude doll replica of himself. He lifted it out, jarring the parent dolls slightly. "Excuse me, Mom," he said. To the replica of his stepfather he offered no apology. Durkin's lips whitened, and for the barest instant a defeated look touched his gaunt face. From thought to attitude he had the whip hand over his stepchildren. Yet even when his power could not be questioned he found himself a shunned and forgotten man. Fury turned the living flesh and bone of his face into a stone mask with features so sharp that his wife recoiled as if feeling the cruel rasp and bite of them against her cheeks. Cursing softly, Durkin swung about and went striding toward the kitchen door without a backward glance.