wondering (despite my efforts to put away
from me a matter which I had decided was not my business) exactly what
Robin _had_ said to Dolly behind that locked door.

CHAPTER TEN.

ROBIN'S WAY OF DOING IT.

What happened when Robin locked the door on himself and Dolly is now set
down here. Strictly speaking it ought to come later, but there is no
need to make a mystery about it. I have taken the account of the
proceedings mainly from the letter which Dolly wrote to Dilly three days
later.

It would be useless to reproduce that document in full. In the first
place, it contains a good deal that is not only irrelevant but
absolutely incomprehensible. There is one mysterious passage, for
instance, occurring right in the middle of the letter, beginning, _To
turn the heel, knit to three beyond the seam-stitch, knit two together,
purl one, turn: then knit ten, knit two together, knit one, purl one_
... introduced by an airy, "By the way, dear, before I forget"----which
appears to have no bearing on the context whatever.

In the second place, Dolly's literary style is as breathlessly devoid of
punctuation as that of most of her sex. Commas and notes of
interrogation form her chief stock-in-trade, though underlining is
freely employed. There is not a single full-stop from start to finish.
The extracts from the letter here reproduced have been edited by me.
Other details of the incident have been tactfully extracted by Kitty and
myself--chiefly Kitty, I must confess--from the principals themselves,
and the whole is now offered to the public, unabridged, with marginal
comments, for the first time.

* * * * *

On entering the little room on the landing Dolly dropped on to a shabby
but comfortable old sofa behind the door, and said, with a contented
sigh--

"I'm so tired, Robin. Aren't you? Let's sit down and not talk till it's
time to go downstairs again. It's--Robin, what _are_ you doing?"

Robin was locking the door.

That operation completed, he turned and looked round the little room.
There was an arm-chair in the corner, but he came and sat down on the
sofa beside Dolly. Dolly gazed at him dumbly.

* * * * *

"He looked so utterly grim and determined" [says the letter], "that my
heart began to bump in a perfectly fatuous way. I felt like a woman
who is going to be murdered in a railway tunnel.

"He sat down, and one of his huge hands