The fact remained, however,—curiously, perhaps, in connection with the usual slightness of all impressions made on her—that there was a memory which never wholly left her. Even when she tried to force it so far into the background of her existence that it might almost be counted as forgotten, it had a trick of rising before her. It was the memory of the empty house as its emptiness had struck to the centre of her being when she had turned from her bedroom window after watching the servants drive away in their cabs. It was also the memory of the hours which had followed—the night in which nobody had been in any of the rooms—no one had gone up or down the stairs—when all had seemed dark and hollow—except the Night Nursery where Robin screamed, and her own room where she herself cowered under the bed clothes and pulled the pillow over her head. But though the picture would not let itself be blotted out, its effect was rather to intensify her sense of relief because she had slipped so safely from under the wheels of destiny. “Sometimes,” she revealed artlessly to Coombe, “while I am driving in the park on a fine afternoon when every one is out and the dresses look like the flower beds, I let myself remember it just to make myself enjoy everything more by contrast.” The elderly woman who had been a nurse in her youth and who had been sent by Lord Coombe temporarily to replace Louisa had not remained long in charge of Robin. She was not young and smart enough for a house on the right side of the right street, and Feather found a young person who looked exactly as she should when she pushed the child’s carriage before her around the square. The square—out of which the right street branches—and the “Gardens” in the middle of the square to which only privileged persons were admitted by private key, the basement kitchen and Servants’ Hall, and the two top floor nurseries represented the world to the child Robin for some years. When she was old enough to walk in the street she was led by the hand over the ground she had travelled daily in her baby carriage. Her first memory of things was a memory of standing on the gravel path in the Square Gardens and watching some sparrows quarrel while Andrews, her nurse, sat on a bench with another nurse and talked in low tones. They were talking in a way Robin always connected with servants and which she naturally accepted as being the method of expression of their species—much as she accepted the mewing of cats and the barking of dogs. As she grew older, she reached the stage of knowing that they were generally saying things they did not wish her to hear.