But even with them he was not really happy.  At heart he was still a strange little boy, different from the rest.  There was a shadow over him.  He knew that apart from him they were nice, ordinary children, and that he was a man full of sorrows and mystery and bitter experience.  He despised them.  They could be bought and bribed and bullied.  But if he could have been ordinary as they were, with quiet, ordinary homes and people who loved one another and paid their bills, he would have cried with joy.

When he did anything particularly bold and reckless he looked out of the corners of his eyes at Frances Wilmot to see if at last he had impressed her.  For she eluded him.  She never defied his authority, and very rarely took part in his escapades.  But she was always there, sometimes in the midst, sometimes just on the fringe, like a bird, intent on business of its own, coming and going in the heart of human affairs.  Sometimes she seemed hardly to be aware of him, and sometimes she treated him as though there were an unspoken intimacy between them which made him glow with pride for days afterwards.  She would put her arm about him and walk with him in the long happy silence of comradeship.  And once, quite unexpectedly, she had seemed gravely troubled.  “Are you a good little boy, Robert?” she had asked, as though she really expected him to know, and relieve her mind about it.

And afterwards he had cried to himself, for he was sure that he was not a good little boy at all.  He was sure that if she knew about his father and the bailiffs she would turn away in sorrow and disgust.

He knew that she too was different from the others, but with a greater difference than his own.  He knew that the Banditti looked up to her for the something in her that he lacked, that if she lifted a finger against him, his authority would be gone.  And the knowledge darkened everything.  It was not that he cried about his leadership.  He would have thrown it at her feet gladly.  But he longed to prove to her that if he was not a good little boy he was, at any rate, a terribly fine fellow.  He had to make her look up to him and admire him like the rest of the Banditti, otherwise he would never hold her fast.  And everything served to that end.  Before her he swaggered monstrously.  He did things which turned him sick with fear.  Once he had climbed to the top of a dizzy wall in the ruins, and had postured on the narrow edge, the bricks crumbling under him, the dust rising in clouds, so that he looked like a small devil dancing in mid-air.  And when he had reached ground again he had found her reading a book.  Then, the plaudits of the awestruck Banditti sounded like jeers.  Nothing had ever hurt so much.

About the time that the Banditti first came into his life the vision of his mother began to grow not less wonderful, but less distinct.  She seemed to stand a little farther off, as though very gradually she were drawing away into the other world, where she belonged.  And often it was Frances who played with him in his secret stories.