and Peter fancied that she was wishing him to understand that she wanted friends who should assist her in rather a rough-and-tumble world. Just as she had once appealed to him to save Crumpet, so now she seemed to appeal for some far greater assistance. Ah! how he could protect her! Peter thought.
Something in Peter's steady gaze seemed suddenly to surprise her. She stopped—the colour mounted into her cheeks—she bent down over the boy.
They were both of them supremely conscious of one another. There was a moment. . . . Then, as men feel, when some music that has held them ceases, they came, with a sense of breathlessness, back to Norah Monogue and her dim room.
Peter was conscious that Robin had watched them both. He almost, Peter thought, chuckled to himself, in his fat solemn way.
“Miss Rossiter,” Norah Monogue said—and her voice seemed a long way away—“has just come back from Germany and has brought some wonderful photographs with her. She was going to show them to me when you came in—”
“Let me see them too, please,” said Peter.
Robin was put on to the floor and he went slowly and with ceremony to an old brown china Toby that had his place on a little shelf by the door. This Toby—his name was Nathaniel—was an old friend of Robin's. Robin sat on the floor in a corner and told Nathaniel the things about the world that he had noticed. Every now and again he paused for Nathaniel's reply; he was always waiting for him to speak, and the continued silence of a now ancient acquaintance had not shaken Robin's faith. . . . Robin forgot the rest of the company.
“Photographs?” said Peter.
“Yes. Germany. I have just been there.” She looked up at him eagerly and then opened a portfolio that she had behind her chair and began to show them.
He bent gravely forward feeling that all of this was pretence of the most absurd kind and that she also knew that it was.
But they were very beautiful photographs—the most
