It did sound like a lost soul at times. What panic possesses a baby who cries in the darkness alone no one will ever know and one may perhaps give thanks to whatever gods there be that the baby itself does not remember. What awful woe of sudden unprotectedness when life exists only through protection—what piteous panic in the midst of black unmercifulness, inarticulate sound howsoever wildly shrill can neither explain nor express. Robin knew only Louisa, warmth, food, sleep and waking. Or if she knew more she was not yet aware that she did. She had reached the age when she generally slept through the night. She might not have disturbed her mother until daylight but Louisa had with forethought given her an infant sleeping potion. It had disagreed with and awakened her. She was uncomfortable and darkness enveloped her. A cry or so and Louisa would ordinarily have come to her sleepy, and rather out of temper, but knowing what to do. In this strange night the normal cry of warning and demand produced no result. No one came. The discomfort continued—the blackness remained black. The cries became shrieks—but nothing followed; the shrieks developed into prolonged screams. No Louisa, no light, no milk. The blackness drew in closer and became a thing to be fought with wild little beating hands. Not a glimmer—not a rustle—not a sound! Then came the cries of the lost soul—alone—alone—in a black world of space in which there was not even another lost soul. And then the panics of which there have been no records and never will be, because if the panic stricken does not die in mysterious convulsions he or she grows away from the memory of a formless past—except that perhaps unexplained nightmares from which one wakens quaking, with cold sweat, may vaguely repeat the long hidden thing. What the child Robin knew in the dark perhaps the silent house which echoed her might curiously have known. But the shrieks wore themselves out at last and sobs came—awful little sobs shuddering through the tiny breast and shaking the baby body. A baby’s sobs are unspeakable things—incredible things. Slower and slower Robin’s came—with small deep gasps and chokings between—and when an uninfantile druglike sleep came, the bitter, hopeless, beaten little sobs went on. But Feather’s head was still burrowed under the soft protection of the pillow. CHAPTER V The morning was a brighter one than London usually indulges in and the sun made its way into Feather’s bedroom to the revealing of its coral pink glow and comfort. She had always liked her bedroom and had usually wakened in it to the sense of luxuriousness it is possible a pet cat feels when it wakens to stretch itself on a cushion with its saucer of cream awaiting it.