“You had told me you had ‘nothing.’ You said no one had ever kissed you. I’d been loved all my life. You had a wondering way of fixing your eyes on me as if I could give you everything—perhaps it was a coxy little chap’s conceit that made me love you for it—but perhaps it wasn’t.” “You _were_ everything,” Robin said—and the mere simpleness of the way in which she said it brought the garden so near that he smelt the warm hawthorn and heard the distant piano organ and it quickened his breath. “It was because I kept seeing your eyes and hearing your laugh that I thought my heart was bursting. I knew you’d go and wait for me—and gradually your little face would begin to look different. I knew you’d believe I’d come. ‘She’s little’—that was what I kept saying to myself again and again. ‘And she’ll cry—awfully—and she’ll think I did it. She’ll never know.’ There,”—he hesitated a moment—“there was a kind of mad shame in it. As if I’d _betrayed_ your littleness and your belief, though I was too young to know what betraying was.” Just as she had looked at him before, “as if he could give her everything,” she was looking at him now. In what other way could she look while he gave her this wonderful soothing, binding softly all the old wounds with unconscious, natural touch because he had really been all her child being had been irradiated and warmed by. There was no pose in his manner—no sentimental or flirtatious youth’s affecting of a picturesque attitude. It was real and he told her this thing because he must for his own relief. “Did you cry?” he said. “Did my little chap’s conceit make too much of it? I suppose I ought to hope it did.” Robin put her hand softly against her heart. “No,” she answered. “I was only a baby, but I think it _killed_ something—here.” He caught a big hard breath. “Oh!” he said and for a few seconds simply sat and gazed at her. “But it came to life again?” he said afterwards. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it could only live in a very little creature. But it was killed.” “I say!” broke from him. “It was like wringing a canary’s neck when it was singing in the sun!” A sudden swelling of the music of a new dance swept in to them and he rose and stood up before her. “Thank you for giving me my chance to tell you,” he said. “This was the apology. You have been kind to listen.” “I wanted to listen,” Robin said. “I am glad I didn’t live a long time and grow old and die without your telling me. When I saw you tonight I almost said aloud, ‘He’s come back!’”