iver" into which the Rileys had been ordered
to move.

"I wish it had burned in the daytime when we could have watched it,"
Beryl had declared, almost resentfully. But Robin's concern had been for
old Granny Castle and little Susy.

Harkness, who had brought them the news, reassured her. "Too bad they
couldn't all a' burned but no such luck--only th' one. It's said that
there are some as _knows_ how a' empty house without so much as a crumb
to draw a rat could a' gone up like that did. And Williams says as how
there was men stood around and wouldn't lift a hand to help put out the
blaze though they took care it didn't spread."

"What do you mean, Mr. Harkness?" broke in Robin.

"Why, just this, Missy, Williams says that there's a lot of bad feeling
stirrin' and bad feelings lead to hasty things like revenge."

"You mean some one of the Mill people set it on fire?" asked Beryl
slowly, with wide eyes.

"And who else'd have bad feelings?"

Robin recalled, with alarm, what Dale had said at the House of
Laughter. Could Dale have done this thing--or helped? Or stood around
and watched it burn? Oh, no, no--not Dale.

Harkness, seeing her concern, dexterously broke a soft-boiled egg into a
silver egg-cup and said in a carefully casual voice, intended to put the
fire quite out of their minds: "Well, the constable'll find the man what
did it, so don't you worry your head, Missy."

Robin, her heart heavy with all she wanted to do and couldn't find a way
to do, swallowed a scream at his "Don't you worry your head." Why _did_
everyone say that to her--just because she was little on the outside? If
_she_ didn't worry her head--who was there to worry?

It was with a heavy spirit she dressed herself--girded herself, she
called it--for her call upon Mr. Norris at the Mills. The long hours of
Sunday, through which she had to wait, had filled her with misgiving.
Now she looked so absurdly small in the mirror, her tousled hair so
childish, no matter how much she tried to tuck it out of sight under the
little dark blue toque, why would anyone, especially a manager of a
Mill, listen to her?

Beryl, stirred to sympathy by Robin's daring to face the lion in his
den, told her for the hundredth time just how she had suffered before
that momentous visit to Martini, the orchestra leader, in New York.

"Why, my hands were clammy and my teeth rattled and everything whirled
in front of me and my knees just knocked together, but, say, I