Benham entered half an hour later with Harry's evening meal.
"I will have mine here, too, Benham," said Robin, "with my father."
"There is one thing, Robin," said Harry a little later, laughing—"what about the letters?"
"Oh, I know!" Robin looked up at his father appealingly. "I don't know what you must think of me over that business. But I suppose I believed for a time in it all, and then when I saw that it wouldn't do I just wanted to get out of it as quickly as I could. I never seem to have thought about it at all—and now I'm more ashamed than I can say. But I think I'll go through with it; I don't see that there's anything else very much for me to do, any other way of making up—I think I'd rather face it."
"Would you?" said Harry. "What about your friends and the House?"
Robin flinched for a moment; then he said resolutely, "Yes, it would be better for them too. You see they know already—the House, I mean. All the chaps in the dining-hall and the picture-gallery, they've known about it all day, and I know that they'd rather I didn't back out of it. Besides—" he hesitated a moment. "There's another thing—I have the kind of feeling that I can't have hurt Dahlia so very much if she's the kind of girl to carry that sort of thing through; if, I mean, she takes it like that she isn't the sort of girl that would mind very much what I had done——"
"Is she," said Harry, "that sort of girl?"
"No, I don't think she is. That's what's puzzled me about it all. She was worth twenty of me really. But any decent sort of girl would have given them back——"
"She has——"
"What?"