“Everything is changed,” she said to Dowie and Mademoiselle who sat on either side of her bed, sometimes pressing her head down onto a kind shoulder, sometimes holding her hand and patting it. “I shall be afraid of everybody forever. People who have sweet faces and kind voices will make me shake all over. Oh! She seemed so kind—so kind!”
It was Dowie whose warm shoulder her face hidden on this time, and Dowie was choked with sobs she dared not let loose. She could only squeeze hard and kiss the “silk curls all in a heap”—poor, tumbled curls, no longer a child’s!
“Aye, my lamb!” she managed to say. “Dowie’s poor pet lamb!”
“It’s the knowing that kind eyes—kind ones—!” she broke off, panting. “It’s the knowing! I didn’t know before! I knew nothing. Now, it’s all over. I’m afraid of all the world!”
“Not all, chèrie,” breathed Mademoiselle.
She sat upright against her pillows. The mirror on a dressing table reflected her image—her blooming tear-wet youth, framed in the wonderful hair falling a shadow about her. She stared at the reflection hard and questioningly.
“I suppose,” her voice was pathos itself in its helplessness, “it is because what you once told me about being pretty, is true. A girl who looks like that,” pointing her finger at the glass, “need not think she can earn her own living. I loathe it,” in fierce resentment at some bitter injustice. “It is like being a person under a curse!”
At this Dowie broke down openly and let her tears run fast. “No, no! You mustn’t say it or think it, my dearie!” she wept. “It might call down a blight on it. You a young thing like a garden flower! And someone—somewhere—God bless him—that some day’ll glory in it—and you’ll glory too. Somewhere he is—somewhere!”
“Let none of them look at me!” cried Robin. “I loathe them, too. I hate everything—and everybody—but you two—just you two.”
Mademoiselle took her in her arms this time when she sobbed again. Mademoiselle knew how at this hour it seemed to her that all her world was laid bare forever more. When the worst of the weeping was over and she lay quiet, but for the deep catching breaths which lifted her breast in slow, childish shudders at intervals, she held Mademoiselle Vallé’s hand and looked at her with a faint, wry smile.