"They're pretty and they're darling on you!"
"A wonderful color." The lawyer took one and examined it. "If you care for them you'd better let me take them back to New York with me and have them strung on a wire that will not break."
"Oh, let him, Beryl. And he can have a good clasp put on. You know you said that clasp was poor."
Beryl hesitated a moment. Ought she to tell him the beads were her mother's and that her mother prized them dearly? No, he might laugh at anyone's caring a fig about just plain beads. She took the envelope Robin brought her, dropped the beads into it, sealed it, and gave it to Robin's guardian.
Cornelius Allendyce slept little that night. He laid it to the extreme quiet of the hills; in reality his head whirled with the amazing impressions that had been forced upon him.
"Extraordinary!" he muttered, staring at the night light. And he repeated it again and again; once, when he thought of the little woman, Mrs. Lynch, with the dreaming eyes which seemed to see beyond things. What was the absurd thing she had said? "'Tis what you give and not what you get is wealth." Extraordinary! And where had Robin picked up these notions concerning the Mill people? And her House of What-did-she-call-it? There was considerable significance about it. Uncanny, downright uncanny, though, for a girl her age to have such a far-reaching vision. Probably the child didn't realize, herself. Well, there was Jeanne d'Arc, and others, too, he pondered, hazily. And this talented girl Robin had found—a most unusual girl, who'd grown up in a tenement like a flower among weeds, yes, he'd seen such flowers growing amid rankest vegetation! She was not unlike Robin, herself. His mind circled to Robin's own little fifth-floor nest and the horrible odors of that dark stairway. Strange, extraordinary, that these two lives had crossed. "This world's a queer world!" Both girls brought up in a poverty that denied them all those jolly sort of advantages young girls liked, and yet each sheltered by a mother's great love from the things in poverty that coarsen and hurt. "Aye, a mother's love," and the little lawyer thought of "Mother Lynch" with something very akin to reverence; and of Jimmie, too, poor Jimmie, who, in his stumbling, mistaken way, had tried to give a mother's love to Robin.
But suddenly the man aroused from his absorbed philosophizing and sat bolt upright in bed. All right to think about letting down barriers—whose barriers were they? Proud old Madame loved those barriers—and she'd never accept, as Budge had, what Budge called the "new ways." What then? "There'll be a reckoning—"
With a sharp little exclamation of annoyance the distraught guardian drew his watch from under his pillow and held it to the tiny shaft of light. "Half-past-one!" Well, he did not need to cross that bridge until he came to it! He dug his tired head into his pillow and went to sleep to dream of Madame Forsyth and Robin and Jeanne d'Arc sitting in a social club at the House of Laughter.