But there had arrived the special morning when she had seen a child who so stood out among a dozen children that she had been startled when she recognized that it was Robin. Andrews had taken her charge to Hyde Park that day and Feather was driving through the Row on her way to a Knightsbridge shop. First her glance had been caught by the hair hanging to the little hips—extraordinary hair in which Andrews herself had a pride. Then she had seen the slender, exquisitely modeled legs, and the dancing sway of the small body. A wonderfully cut, stitched, and fagotted smock and hat she had, of course, taken in at a flash. When the child suddenly turned to look at some little girls in a pony cart, the amazing damask of her colour, and form and depth of eye had given her another slight shock. She realized that what she had thrust lightly away in a corner of her third floor produced an unmistakable effect when turned out into the light of a gay world. The creature was tall too—for six years old. Was she really six? It seemed incredible. Ten more years and she would be sixteen. Mrs. Heppel-Bevill had a girl of fifteen, who was a perfect catastrophe. She read things and had begun to talk about her “right to be a woman.” Emily Heppel-Bevill was only thirty-seven—three years from forty. Feather had reached the stage of softening in her disdain of the women in their thirties. She had found herself admitting that—in these days—there were women of forty who had not wholly passed beyond the pale into that outer darkness where there was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. But there was no denying that this six year old baby, with the dancing step, gave one—almost hysterically—“to think.” Her imagination could not—never had and never would she have allowed it to—grasp any belief that she herself could change. A Feather, No! But a creature of sixteen, eighteen—with eyes that shape—with lashes an inch long—with yards of hair—standing by one’s side in ten years! It was ghastly!