e a
daughter of the house she lived in. I knew what I was talking about."

"Did she?" was Coombe's concise question.

"Of course she did--though of course she pretended not to. Girls always
pretend. But I did my duty as a parent. And I told her that if she got
herself into any mess she mustn't come to me."

Lord Coombe regarded her in silence for a moment or so. It was one of
the looks which always made her furious in her small way.

"Good morning," he said and turned his back and walked out of the room.
Almost immediately after he had descended the stairs she heard the front
door close after him.

It was the kind of thing which made her feel her utter helplessness
against him and which enraged all the little cat in her being. She
actually ground her small teeth.

"I was quite right," she said. "It's her affair to take care of herself.
Would he want her to come to _him_ in any silly fix? I should like to
see her try it."

CHAPTER III

Robin sat at the desk in her private room and looked at a key she held
in her hand. She had just come upon it among some papers. She had put it
into a narrow lacquered box when she arranged her belongings, after she
left the house in which her mother continued to live. It was the key
which gave entrance to the Gardens. Each householder possessed one. She
alone knew why she rather timidly asked her mother's permission to keep
this one.

"One of the first things I seem to remember is watching the gardeners
planting flowers," Robin had said. "They had rows of tiny pots with
geraniums and lobelia in them. I have been happy there. I should like to
be able to go in sometimes and sit under the trees. If you do not
mind--"

Feather did not mind. She herself was not in the least likely to be
seized with a desire to sit under trees in an atmosphere heavy with
nursemaids and children.

So Robin had been allowed to keep the key and until to-day she had not
opened the lacquer box. Was it quite by accident that she had found it?
She was not quite sure it was and she was asking herself questions, as
she sat looking at it as it lay in her palm.

The face of the whole world had changed since the night when she had sat
among banked flowers and palms and ferns, and heard the splashing of the
fountain and the sound of the music and dancing, and Donal Muir's voice,
all at the same time. That which had happened had made everybody and
everything different; and, because she lived in this