What he meant, and what Mademoiselle Vallé knew he meant—also what he knew she knew he meant—was that a woman, who was a heartless fool, without sympathy or perception, would not have the delicacy to feel that the girl must be shielded, and might actually see a sort of ghastly joke in a story of Mademoiselle Vallé’s sacrosanct charge simply walking out of her enshrining arms into such a “galere” as the most rackety and adventurous of pupils could scarcely have been led into. Such a point of view would have been quite possible for Feather—even probable, in the slightly spiteful attitude of her light mind. “She was away from home. Only you and I and Dowie know,” answered Mademoiselle. “Let us remain the only persons who know,” said Coombe. “Robin will say nothing.” They both knew that. She had been feverish and ill for several days and Dowie had kept her in bed saying that she had caught cold. Neither of the two women had felt it possible to talk to her. She had lain staring with a deadly quiet fixedness straight before her, saying next to nothing. Now and then she shuddered, and once she broke into a mad, heart-broken fit of crying which she seemed unable to control. “Everything is changed,” she said to Dowie and Mademoiselle who sat on either side of her bed, sometimes pressing her head down onto a kind shoulder, sometimes holding her hand and patting it. “I shall be afraid of everybody forever. People who have sweet faces and kind voices will make me shake all over. Oh! She seemed so kind—so kind!” It was Dowie whose warm shoulder her face hidden on this time, and Dowie was choked with sobs she dared not let loose. She could only squeeze hard and kiss the “silk curls all in a heap”—poor, tumbled curls, no longer a child’s! “Aye, my lamb!” she managed to say. “Dowie’s poor pet lamb!” “It’s the knowing that kind eyes—kind ones—!” she broke off, panting. “It’s the _knowing!_ I didn’t know before! I knew nothing. Now, it’s all over. I’m afraid of all the world!” “Not all, _chèrie_,” breathed Mademoiselle. She sat upright against her pillows. The mirror on a dressing table reflected her image—her blooming tear-wet youth, framed in the wonderful hair falling a shadow about her. She stared at the reflection hard and questioningly. “I suppose,” her voice was pathos itself in its helplessness, “it is because what you once told me about being pretty, is true. A girl who looks like _that_,” pointing her finger at the glass, “need not think she can earn her own living. I loathe it,” in fierce resentment at some bitter injustice. “It is like being a person under a curse!” At this Dowie broke down openly and let her tears run fast. “No, no! You mustn’t say it or think it, my dearie!” she wept. “It might call down a blight on it. You a young thing like a garden flower! And someone—somewhere—God bless him—that some day’ll glory in it—and you’ll glory too. Somewhere he is—somewhere!”