She could not hold herself back. She caught at him with her arms and meant to drag him to her breast. “No! No! Donal!” she cried. “Darling! No—No!” But, as suddenly as the queer unchildish thing had broken out, did he remember himself and boy shame at his fantastic emotion overtook him. He had never spoken like that to anyone before! It was almost as bad as bursting out crying! The red tide ebbed away and he withdrew himself awkwardly from her embrace. He said not another word and sat down in his corner with his back turned toward the world.
That the Lady Downstairs, who was so fond of laughing and who knew so many persons who seemed to laugh nearly all the time, might have been joking about being her mother presented itself to Robin as a vague solution of the problem. The Lady had laughed when she said it, as people so often laughed at children. Perhaps she had only been amusing herself as grown-up persons were apparently entitled to do. Even Donal had not seemed wholly convinced and though his mother had said the Lady Downstairs was—somehow the subject had been changed at once. Mrs. Muir had so soon begun to tell them a story. Robin was not in the least aware that she had swiftly distracted their attention from a question, any discussion of which would have involved explanations she could not have produced. It would have been impossible to make it clear to any child. She herself was helpless before the situation and therefore her only refuge was to make the two think of other things. She had so well done this that Robin had gone home later only remembering the brightly transitory episode as she recalled others as brief and bright, when she had stared at a light and lovely figure standing on the nursery threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews, without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact, too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal’s mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary conundrum.
Robin, like Donal, slept perfectly through the night. Her sleep was perhaps made more perfect by fair dreams in which she played in the Gardens and she and Donal ran to and from the knees of the Mother lady to ask questions and explain their games. As the child had often, in the past, looked up at the sky, so she had looked up into the clear eyes of the Mother lady. There was something in them which she had never seen before but which she kept wanting to see again. Then there came a queer bit of a dream about the Lady Downstairs. She came dancing towards them dressed in hyacinths and with her arms full of daffodils. She danced before Donal’s Mother—danced and laughed as if she thought they were all funny. She threw a few daffodils at them and then danced away. The daffodils lay on the gravel walk and they all looked at them but no one picked them up. Afterwards—in the dream—Mrs. Muir suddenly caught her in her arms and kissed her and Robin was glad and felt warm all over—inside and out.
She wakened smiling at the dingy ceiling of the dingy room. There was but one tiny shadow in the world, which was the fear that Andrews would get well too quickly. She was no longer in bed but was well enough to sit up and sew a little before the tiny fire in the atom of a servant’s room grate. The doctor would not let her go out yet; therefore, Anne still remained in charge. Founding one’s hope on previous knowledge of Anne’s habits, she might be trusted to sit and read and show no untoward curiosity.
From her bed Robin could see the sky was blue. That meant that she would be taken out. She lay as quiet as a mouse and thought of the joy before her, until Anne came to dress her and give her her breakfast.
“We’ll put on your rose-coloured smock this morning,” the girl said, when the dressing began. “I like the hat and socks that match.”
Anne was not quite like Andrews who was not talkative. She made a conversational sort of remark after she had tied the white shoes.
“You’ve got pretty little aristocratic legs of your own,” she said amiably. “I like my children to have nice legs.”
Robin was uplifted in spirit by the commendation, but she hoped Anne would put on her own things quickly. Sometimes she was rather a long time. The one course, however, towards which discretion pointed as entirely safe was the continuance of being as quiet as a mouse—even quieter, if such thing might be—so that nothing might interfere with anything any one wanted to do. To interfere would have been to attract attention and might lead to delay. So she stood and watched the sparrows inoffensively until Anne called her.