The little fellow looked at Meg and then up at him. In that look he saw that they did know.
“Mother was going to give that dollar to me,” he said, brokenly. “I was going to the Fair on it. Everybody is going, everybody is talking about it, and thinking about it! Nobody’s been talking of nothing else for months and months! The streets are full of people on their way! And they all pass me by.”
He rubbed his sleeve across his forlorn face and swallowed hard.
“There’s pictures in the shops,” he went on, “and flags flying. And everything’s going that way, and me staying behind!”
Two of the large, splendid drops, which had sometimes gathered on Meg’s eyelashes and fallen on the straw, when she had been telling stories in the barn, fell now upon her lap.
“Robin!” she said.
Robin stood and stared very straight before him for a minute, and then his eyes turned and met hers.
“We’re very poor,” he said to her, “but everybody has—has something.”
“We couldn’t leave him behind,” Meg said, “we couldn’t! Let’s think.” And she put her head down, resting her elbows on her knee and clutching her forehead with her supple, strong little hands.
“What can we do without?” said Robin. “Let’s do without something.”