Robin suddenly caught the kind woman’s wrists in her hands and held them while she fixed her eyes on her. The childish passion of dread and shyness in them broke Dowson’s heart because it was so ignorant and young.
“I’m growing up. There’s something—I must know something! I never knew how to ask about it before.” It was so plain to Dowson that she did not know how to ask about it now. “Someone said that Lord Coombe might have been a co-respondent in the Thorpe case——”
“These wicked children!” gasped Dowie. “They’re not children at all!”
“Everybody’s horrid but you and Mademoiselle,” cried Robin, brokenly. She held the wrists harder and ended in a sort of outburst. “If my father were alive—could he bring a divorce suit——And would Lord Coombe——”
Dowson burst into open tears. And then, so did Robin. She dropped Dowson’s wrists and threw her arms around her waist, clinging to it in piteous repentance.
“No, I won’t!” she cried out. “I oughtn’t to try to make you tell me. You can’t. I’m wicked to you. Poor Dowie—darling Dowie! I want to kiss you, Dowie! Let me—let me!”
She sobbed childishly on the comfortable breast and Dowie hugged her close and murmured in a choked voice,
“My lamb! My pet lamb!”
CHAPTER XIX
Mademoiselle Vallé and Dowson together realized that after this the growing up process was more rapid. It always seems incredibly rapid to lookers on, after thirteen. But these two watchers felt that, in Robin’s case, it seemed unusually so. Robin had always been interested in her studies and clever at them, but, suddenly, she developed a new concentration and it was of an order which her governess felt denoted the secret holding of some object in view. She devoted herself to her lessons with a quality of determination which was new. She had previously been absorbed, but not determined. She made amazing strides and seemed to aspire to a thoroughness and perfection girls did not commonly aim at—especially at the frequently rather preoccupied hour of blossoming. Mademoiselle encountered in her an eagerness that she—who knew girls—would have felt it optimistic to expect in most cases. She wanted to work over hours; she would have read too much if she had not been watched and gently coerced.