She had
so well done this that Robin had gone home later only remembering
the brightly transitory episode as she recalled others as brief and
bright, when she had stared at a light and lovely figure standing
on the nursery threshold and asking careless questions of Andrews,
without coming in and risking the freshness of her draperies by
contact with London top-floor grubbiness. The child was, in fact,
too full of the reality of her happiness with Donal and Donal's
mother to be more than faintly bewildered by a sort of visionary
conundrum.
Robin, like Donal, slept perfectly through the night. Her sleep
was perhaps made more perfect by fair dreams in which she played
in the Gardens and she and Donal ran to and from the knees of
the Mother lady to ask questions and explain their games. As the
child had often, in the past, looked up at the sky, so she had looked
up into the clear eyes of the Mother lady. There was something in
them which she had never seen before but which she kept wanting to
see again. Then there came a queer bit of a dream about the Lady
Downstairs. She came dancing towards them dressed in hyacinths
and with her arms full of daffodils. She danced before Donal's
Mother--danced and laughed as if she thought they were all funny.
She threw a few daffodils at them and then danced away. The
daffodils lay on the gravel walk and they all looked at them but
no one picked them up.
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