Helen looking down at him with anguished eyes—he was buttoning his shoes—made an unearthly effort to find words, but, as she said them, she knew they were not the right ones.
“She will be disappointed, of course, but she is so little that she will not feel it as much as if she were bigger. She will get over it, darling. Very little girls do not remember things long.” Oh, how coarse and crass and stupid it sounded—how coarse and crass and stupid to say it to this small defiant scrap of what seemed the inevitable suffering of the world!
The clear blue of the eyes Robin had dwelt in, lifted itself to her. There was something almost fierce in it—almost like impotent hatred of something.
“She won’t,” he said, and she actually heard him grind his little teeth after it.
He did not look like Donal when he was dressed and sat at the breakfast table. He did not eat much of his porridge, but she saw that he determinedly ate some. She felt several times as if he actually did not look like anybody she had ever seen. And at the same time his fair hair, his fair cheeks, and the fair sturdy knees beneath his swinging kilt made him seem as much a little boy as she had ever known him. It was his hot blue eyes which were different.
He obeyed her every wish and followed where she led. When the train laboured out of the big station he had taken a seat in a corner and sat with his face turned to the window, so that his back was towards her. He stared and stared at the passing country and she could only see part of his cheek and the side of his neck. She could not help watching them and presently she saw a hot red glow under the skin as if a flood had risen. It subsided in a few moments, but presently she saw it rise again. This happened several times and he was holding his lip with, his teeth. Once she saw his shoulders move and he coughed obstinately two or three times. She knew that he would die before he would let himself cry, but she wished he would descend to it just this once, as the fields and hedges raced past and he was carried “Away! Away!” It might be that it was all his manhood she was saving for him.
He really made her heart stand still for a moment just as she was thinking this and saying it to herself almost fiercely. He suddenly turned on her; the blue of his eyes was flaming and the tide had risen again in his cheeks and neck. It was a thing like rage she saw before her—a child’s rage and impotently fierce. He cried out as if he were ending a sentence he had not finished when he spoke as he sat on the floor buttoning his shoes.
“She has no one but me to remember!” he said. “No one but me had ever even kissed her. She didn’t know!”
To her amazement he clenched both his savage young fists and shook them before him.
“It’ll kill me!” he raged.