Such questions as she asked were not of the order Robin had expected. She led her into talk and drew Mademoiselle Vallé into the conversation. It was talk which included personal views of books, old gardens and old houses, people, pictures and even—lightly—politics. Robin found herself quite incidentally, as it were, reading aloud to her an Italian poem. She ceased to be afraid and was at ease. She forgot Lord Coombe. The Duchess listening and watching her warmed to her task of delicate investigation and saw reason for anticipating agreeably stimulating things. She was not taking upon herself a merely benevolent duty which might assume weight and become a fatigue. In fact she might trust Coombe for that. After all it was he who had virtually educated the child—little as she was aware of the singular fact. It was he who had dragged her forth from her dog kennel of a top floor nursery and quaintly incongruous as it seemed, had found her a respectable woman for a nurse and an intelligent person for a governess and companion as if he had been a domesticated middle class widower with a little girl to play mother to. She saw in the situation more than others would have seen in it, but she saw also the ironic humour of it. Coombe—with the renowned cut of his overcoat—the perfection of his line and scarcely to be divined suggestions of hue—Coombe! She did not avoid all mention of his name during the interview, but she spoke of him only casually, and though the salary she offered was an excellent one, it was not inordinate. Robin could not feel that she was not being accepted as of the class of young persons who support themselves self-respectingly, though even the most modest earned income would have represented wealth to her ignorance. Before they parted she had obtained the position so pleasantly described by Mademoiselle Vallé as being something like that of a young lady in waiting. “But I am really a companion and I will do everything—everything I can so that I shall be worth keeping,” she thought seriously. She felt that she should want to be kept. If Lord Coombe was a friend of her employer’s it was because the Duchess did not know what others knew. And her house was not his house—and the hideous thing she had secretly loathed would be at an end. She would be supporting herself as decently and honestly as Mademoiselle or Dowie had supported themselves all their lives. With an air of incidentally recalling a fact, the Duchess said after they had risen to leave her: “Mademoiselle Vallé tells me you have an elderly nurse you are very fond of. She seems to belong to a class of servants almost extinct.” “I love her,” Robin faltered—because the sudden reminder brought back a pang to her. There was a look in her eyes which faltered also. “She loves me. I don’t know how——” but there she stopped.