Each person in the little drawing-room saw the queer flame in the child-face. She shrilled out her words:
"Andrews will pinch me—Andrews will pinch me! But—No—No!"
She kept her hands behind her back and hatred surged up in her soul.
In spite of her tender years, the doctor held to the theory that Robin had suffered a shock; she must be taken away to be helped by the bracing air of the Norfolk coast. Before she went, workmen were to be seen coming in and out of the house. When she returned to London, she was led into rooms she had never been in before—light and airy rooms with pretty walls and furniture.
It was "a whim of Coombe's," as Feather put it, that she should no longer occupy the little dog-kennels of nurseries, so these new apartments had been added in the rear. A whim of his also that Andrews, whose disciplinary methods included pinching, should be dismissed and replaced by Dowson, a motherly creature with a great deal of common sense. Robin's lonely little heart opened to her new nurse, who became in time her "Dowie."
It was Dowson who made it clear to Lord Coombe, at length, that Robin had reached the age when she needed a governess, and it was he who said to Feather a few days later:
"A governess will come here to-morrow at eleven o'clock. She is a Mademoiselle Vallé. She is accustomed to the education of young children. She will present herself for your approval."
"What on earth can it matter?" Feather cried.
"It does not matter to you," he answered. "It chances for the time being to matter to me."
Mademoiselle Vallé was an intelligent, mature French woman, with a peculiar power to grasp an intricate situation. She learned to love the child she taught—a child so strangely alone. As time went on she came to know that Robin was to receive every educational advantage, every instruction. In his impersonal, aloof way Coombe was fixed in his intention to provide her with life's defences. As she grew, graceful as a willow wand, into a girlhood startlingly lovely, she learned modern languages, learned to dance divinely.