He suddenly remembered things his Mother had told him about poor people. Perhaps she was poor. Could she be poor when her frock and hat and coat were so pretty? It was not polite to ask. But the thought made him love her more. He felt something warm rush all over his body. The truth, if he had been old enough to be aware of it, was that the entire simpleness of her acceptance of things as they were, and a something which was unconsciousness of any cause for complaint, moved his child masculinity enormously. His old nurse’s voice came from her corner again. “I must go to Nanny,” he said, feeling somehow as if he had been running fast. “I’ll come tomorrow and bring two picture books.” He was a loving, warm blooded child human thing, and the expression of affection was, to him, a familiar natural impulse. He put his strong little eight-year-old arms round her and kissed her full on her mouth, as he embraced her with all his strength. He kissed her twice. It was the first time for Robin. Andrews did not kiss. There was no one else. It was the first time, and Nature had also made her a loving, warm blooded, human thing. How beautiful he was—how big—how strong his arms were—and how soft and warm his mouth felt. She stood and gazed at him with wide asking eyes and laughed a little. She had no words because she did not know what had happened. “Don’t you like to be kissed?” said Donal, uncertain because she looked so startled and had not kissed him back. “Kissed,” she repeated, with a small, caught breath, “ye-es.” She knew now what it was. It was being kissed. She drew nearer at once and lifted up her face as sweetly and gladly, as a flower lifts itself to the sun. “Kiss me again,” she said quite eagerly. As ingenuously and heartily as before, he kissed her again and, this time, she kissed too. When he ran quickly away, she stood looking after him with smiling, trembling lips, uplifted, joyful—wondering and amazed. CHAPTER VIII When she went back to Andrews she carried the pricked leaves with her. She could not have left them behind. From what source she had drawn a characterizing passionate, though silent, strength of mind and body, it would be difficult to explain. Her mind and her emotions had been left utterly unfed, but they were not of the inert order which scarcely needs feeding. Her feeling for the sparrows had held more than she could have expressed; her secret adoration of the “Lady Downstairs” was an intense thing. Her immediate surrender to the desire in the first pair of human eyes—child eyes though they were—which had ever called to her being for response, was simple and undiluted rapture. She had passed over her little soul without a moment’s delay and without any knowledge of the giving. It had flown from her as a bird might fly from darkness into the sun. Eight-year-old Donal was the sun.