“We let you sleep as late as we could, Donal,” she said. “You must get up quickly now and have breakfast. Something has happened. We are obliged to go back to Scotland by very early train. There is not a minute to waste.” At first he only said: “Back!” “Yes, dear. Get up.” “To Braemarnie?” “Yes, dear laddie!” He felt himself grow hot and cold. “Away! Away!” he said again vaguely. “Yes. Get up, dear.” He was as she had said only a little boy and accustomed to do as he was told. He was also a fine, sturdy little Scot with a pride of his own. His breeding had been of the sort which did not include insubordinate scenes, so he got out of bed and began to dress. But his mother saw that his hands shook. “I shall not see Robin,” he said in a queer voice. “She won’t find me when she goes behind the lilac bushes. She won’t know why I don’t come.” He swallowed very hard and was dead still for a few minutes, though he did not linger over his dressing. His mother felt that the whole thing was horrible. He was acting almost like a young man even now. She did not know how she could bear it. She spoke to him in a tone which was actually rather humble. “If we knew where she lived you—you could write a little letter and tell her about it. But we do not where she lives.” He answered her very low. “That’s it. And she’s little—and she won’t understand. She’s very little—really.” There was a harrowingly protective note in his voice. “Perhaps—she’ll cry.” Helen looking down at him with anguished eyes—he was buttoning his shoes—made an unearthly effort to find words, but, as she said them, she knew they were not the right ones. “She will be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it, darling. Very little girls do not remember things long.” Oh, how coarse and crass and stupid it sounded—how coarse and crass and stupid to say it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering of the world! The clear blue of the eyes Robin had dwelt in, lifted itself to her. There was something almost fierce in it—almost like impotent hatred of something. “She won’t,” he said, and she actually heard him grind his little teeth after it. He did not look like Donal when he was dressed and sat at the breakfast table. He did not eat much of his porridge, but she saw that he determinedly ate some. She felt several times as if he actually did not look like anybody she had ever seen. And at the same time his fair hair, his fair cheeks, and the fair sturdy knees beneath his swinging kilt made him seem as much a little boy as she had ever known him. It was his hot blue eyes which were different.