nd this alone, which
caused him to appear--the apotheosis of exquisite fitness in form--at
her door.

He listened while she poured it all forth, sobbing. Her pretty hair
loosened itself and fell about her in wild but enchanting disorder.

"I would do anything--_any one_ asked me, if they would take care of
me."

A shuddering knowledge that it was quite true that she would do anything
for any man who would take care of her produced an effect on him nothing
else would have produced.

"Do I understand," he said, "that you are willing that _I_ should
arrange this for you?"

"Do you mean--really?" she faltered. "Will you--will you--?"

Her uplifted eyes were like a young angel's brimming with crystal drops
which slipped--as a child's tears slip--down her cheeks.

* * * * *

The florist came and refilled the window-boxes of the slice of a house
with an admirable arrangement of fresh flowers. It became an
established fact that the household had not fallen to pieces, and its
frequenters gradually returned to it, wearing, indeed, the air of people
who had never really remained away from it.

As a bird in captivity lives in its cage and, perhaps, believes it to be
the world, Robin lived in her nursery. She was put to bed and taken up,
she was fed and dressed in it, and once a day she was taken out of it
downstairs and into the street. That was all.

It is a somewhat portentous thing to realise that a newborn human
creature can only know what it is taught. To Robin the Lady Downstairs
was merely a radiant and beautiful being of whom one might catch a
glimpse through a door, or if one pressed one's face against the window
pane at the right moment. On the very rare occasions when the Lady
appeared on the threshold of the day-nursery, Robin stood and stared
with immense startled eyes and answered in a whisper the banal little
questions put to her.

So she remained unaware of mothers and unaware of affection. She never
played with other children. Andrews, her nurse--as behooved one employed
in a house about which there "was talk" bore herself with a lofty and
exclusive air.

"My rule is to keep myself to myself," she said in the kitchen, "and to
look as if I was the one that would turn up noses, if noses was to be
turned up. There's those that would snatch away their children if I let
Robin begin to make up to them."

But one morning, when Robin was watching some quarrelsome sparrows, an