Seeing her, Anne sprang to her feet. The rose was a piteous thing beaten to earth by a storm. The child’s face was swollen and stained, her hair was tangled and damp there were dark marks of mould on her dress, her hat, her hands, her white cheeks; her white shoes were earth-stained also, and the feet in the rose-coloured socks dragged themselves heavily—slowly.
“My gracious!” the young woman almost shrieked. “What’s happened! Where have you been? Did you fall down? Ah, my good gracious! Mercy me!”
Robin caught her breath but did not say a word.
“You fell down on a flower bed where they’d been watering the plants!” almost wept Anne. “You must have. There isn’t that much dirt anywhere else in the Gardens.”
And when she took her charge home that was the story she told Andrews. Out of Robin she could get nothing, and it was necessary to have an explanation.
The truth, of which she knew nothing, was but the story of a child’s awful dismay and a child’s woe at one of Life’s first betrayals. It would be left behind by the days which came and went—it would pass—as all things pass but the everlasting hills—but in this way it was that it came and wrote itself upon the tablets of a child’s day.
CHAPTER XI
“The child’s always been well, ma’am,” Andrews was standing, the image of exact correctness, in her mistress’ bedroom, while Feather lay in bed with her breakfast on a convenient and decorative little table. “It’s been a thing I’ve prided myself on. But I should say she isn’t well now.”
“Well, I suppose it’s only natural that she should begin sometime,” remarked Feather. “They always do, of course. I remember we all had things when we were children. What does the doctor say? I hope it isn’t the measles, or the beginning of anything worse?”
“No, ma’am, it isn’t. It’s nothing like a child’s disease. I could have managed that. There’s good private nursing homes for them in these days. Everything taken care of exactly as it should be and no trouble of disinfecting and isolating for the family. I know what you’d have wished to have done, ma’am.”