“Let none of them look at me!” cried Robin. “I loathe them, too. I hate everything—and everybody—but you two—just you two.” Mademoiselle took her in her arms this time when she sobbed again. Mademoiselle knew how at this hour it seemed to her that all her world was laid bare forever more. When the worst of the weeping was over and she lay quiet, but for the deep catching breaths which lifted her breast in slow, childish shudders at intervals, she held Mademoiselle Vallé’s hand and looked at her with a faint, wry smile. “You were too kind to tell me what a stupid little fool I was when I talked to you about taking a place in an office!” she said. “I know now that you would not have allowed me to do the things I was so sure I could do. It was only my ignorance and conceit. I can’t answer advertisements. Any bad person can say what they choose in an advertisement. If that woman had advertised, she would have described Hélène. And there was no Hélène.” One of the shuddering catches of her breath broke in here. After it, she said, with a pitiful girlishness of regret: “I—I could _see_ Hélène. I have known so few people well enough to love them. No girls at all. I though—perhaps—we should begin to _love_ each other. I can’t bear to think of that—that she never was alive at all. It leaves a sort of empty place.” When she had sufficiently recovered herself to be up again, Mademoiselle Vallé said to her that she wished her to express her gratitude to Lord Coombe. “I will if you wish it,” she answered. “Don’t you feel that it is proper that you should do it? Do you not wish it yourself?” inquired Mademoiselle. Robin looked down at the carpet for some seconds. “I know,” she at last admitted, “that it is proper. But I don’t wish to do it.” “No?” said Mademoiselle Vallé. Robin raised her eyes from the carpet and fixed them on her. “It is because of—reasons,” she said. “It is part of the horror I want to forget. Even you mayn’t know what it has done to me. Perhaps I am turning into a girl with a bad mind. Bad thoughts keep swooping down on me—like great black ravens. Lord Coombe saved me, but I think hideous things about him. I heard Andrews say he was bad when I was too little to know what it meant. Now, I _know_, I remember that _he_ knew because he chose to know—of his own free will. He knew that woman and she knew him. _How_ did he know her?” She took a forward step which brought her nearer to Mademoiselle. “I never told you but I will tell you now,” she confessed, “When the door opened and I saw him standing against the light I—I did not think he had come to save me.” “_Mon Dieu!_” breathed Mademoiselle in soft horror.