It was nearly three o’clock when Feather went upstairs to her dozing maid, because, after he had left her, she sat some time in the empty, untidy little drawing-room and gazed straight before her at a painted screen on which shepherdesses and swains were dancing in a Watteau glade infested by flocks of little Loves. CHAPTER XIV When, from Robin’s embarrassed young consciousness, there had welled up the hesitating confession, “She—doesn’t like me,” she could not, of course, have found words in which to make the reasons for her knowledge clear, but they had for herself no obscurity. The fair being who, at rare intervals, fluttered on the threshold of her world had a way of looking at her with a shade of aloof distaste in her always transient gaze. The unadorned fact was that Feather did _not_ like her. She had been outraged by her advent. A baby was absurdly “out of the picture.” So far as her mind encompassed a future, she saw herself flitting from flower to flower of “smart” pleasures and successes, somehow, with more money and more exalted invitations—“something” vaguely—having happened to the entire Lawdor progeny, and she, therefore, occupying a position in which it was herself who could gracefully condescend to others. There was nothing so “stodgy” as children in the vision. When the worst came to the worst, she had been consoled by the thought that she had really managed the whole thing very cleverly. It was easier, of course, to so arrange such things in modern days and in town. The Day Nursery and the Night Nursery on the third floor, a smart-looking young woman who knew her business, who even knew what to buy for a child and where to buy it, without troubling any one simplified the situation. Andrews had been quite wonderful. Nobody can bother one about a healthy, handsome child who is seen meticulously cared for and beautifully dressed, being pushed or led or carried out in the open air every day.