“Oh, I expect we shall be seeing her again some day,” said Mrs. Rickett, “when poor Mrs. Fielding is a bit stronger.  She’s busy now, but she’ll come back, you’ll see.”

Again almost violently Robin moved in his chair.  “She won’t!” he flung out in a fierce undertone.  “Tell you she won’t!”

“How can you possibly know?” reasoned Mrs. Rickett.

“I do know,” he said doggedly.  “She won’t come back,—­anyhow not till—­” his utterance trailed off into an unintelligible murmur in his throat and he became silent.

Mrs. Rickett shook out a small damp garment, and spread it upon the table with care.  “I don’t see how anyone is to say as she won’t come back,” she said.  “Of course I know she’s a lady born, but that don’t prevent her making friends among humbler folk.  She’s talked of this place more than once as if she’d like to settle here.”

“She won’t then!” growled Robin.  “She’ll never do that, not while—.”  Again he became inarticulate, muttering deeply in his throat like an animal goaded to savagery.

Mrs. Rickett turned from her ironing to regard him.  She had never found Robin hard to understand before, but there was something about him to-day which was wholly beyond her comprehension.  He was like some wild creature that had received a cruel wound.  Dumb resentment and fiery suffering seemed to mingle in his half uttered sentences.  As he sat there, huddled forward with his hands pathetically clenched she thought she had never seen a more piteous sight.

“Lor’, Robin, my dear!” she said.  “What ever makes you know such a lot?  Why shouldn’t she come back then?  Tell me that!”

He shook his shaggy head, but more in protest than refusal.

Mrs. Rickett bent down over him, her kindly red face full of the most motherly concern.

“What’s troubling you, Robin?” she said.  “You aren’t—­fretting for her, are you?”

He threw her one of his wild, furtive looks, and again in his eyes she caught a glimpse of something that deeply moved her.  She laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

“Is that it, lad?  Are you wanting her?  Ah, don’t fret then—­don’t fret!  She’ll surely come back—­some day.”

The boy’s face quivered.  He looked down at his clenched hands, and at length jerkily, laboriously, he spoke, giving difficult and bitter utterance to the trouble that gnawed at his heart.

“It’s—­Dicky that wants her.  But she won’t come—­she won’t come—­while I’m here.”  A sudden hard shiver went through him, he drew his breath through his set teeth, with a desperate sound.  “No woman would,” he said with hard despair.

And then abruptly, as if with speech his misery had become unendurable, he blundered to his feet with outflung arms, making the only outcry against fate that his poor stunted brain had ever accomplished.  “It isn’t fair!” he wailed.  “It isn’t right!  I’m going to God—­to tell Him so!”