After it, she said, with
a pitiful girlishness of regret: "I--I could SEE Helene. I have
known so few people well enough to love them. No girls at all. I
though--perhaps--we should begin to LOVE each other. I can't bear
to think of that--that she never was alive at all. It leaves a
sort of empty place."
When she had sufficiently recovered herself to be up again,
Mademoiselle Valle said to her that she wished her to express her
gratitude to Lord Coombe.
"I will if you wish it," she answered.
"Don't you feel that it is proper that you should do it? Do you
not wish it yourself?" inquired Mademoiselle. Robin looked down
at the carpet for some seconds.
"I know," she at last admitted, "that it is proper. But I don't
wish to do it."
"No?" said Mademoiselle Valle.
Robin raised her eyes from the carpet and fixed them on her.
"It is because of--reasons," she said. "It is part of the horror
I want to forget. Even you mayn't know what it has done to me.
Perhaps I am turning into a girl with a bad mind. Bad thoughts keep
swooping down on me--like great black ravens. Lord Coombe saved
me, but I think hideous things about him. I heard Andrews say he
was bad when I was too little to know what it meant. Now, I KNOW,
I remember that HE knew because he chose to know--of his own free
will. He knew that woman and she knew him. HOW did he know her?"
She took a forward step which brought her nearer to Mademoiselle.
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