Chapter 15

Before Robin had been taken to the seaside to be helped by the
bracing air of the Norfolk coast to recover her lost appetite
and forget her small tragedy, she had observed that unaccustomed
things were taking place in the house. Workmen came in and out
through the mews at the back and brought ladders with them and
tools in queer bags. She heard hammerings which began very early
in the morning and went on all day. As Andrews had trained her not
to ask tiresome questions, she only crept now and then to a back
window and peeped out. But in a few days Dowson took her away.

When she came back to London, she was not taken up the steep dark
stairs to the third floor. Dowson led her into some rooms she had
never seen before. They were light and airy and had pretty walls
and furniture. A sitting-room on the ground floor had even a round
window with plants in it and a canary bird singing in a cage.

"May we stay here?" she asked Dowson in a whisper.

"We are going to live here," was the answer.

And so they did.

At first Feather occasionally took her intimates to see the
additional apartments.

"In perfect splendour is the creature put up, and I with a bedroom
like a coalhole and such drawing-rooms as you see each time you
enter the house!" she broke forth spitefully one day when she
forgot herself.

She said it to the Starling and Harrowby, who had been simply gazing
about them in fevered mystification, because the new development
was a thing which must invoke some more or less interesting
explanation. At her outbreak, all they could do was to gaze at her
with impartial eyes, which suggested question, and Feather shrugged
pettish shoulders.

"You knew _I_ didn't do it. How could I?" she said. "It is a queer
whim of Coombe's. Of course, it is not the least like him. I call
it morbid."

After which people knew about the matter and found it a subject
for edifying and quite stimulating discussion. There was something
fantastic in the situation. Coombe was the last man on earth to
have taken the slightest notice of the child's existence! It was
believed that he had never seen her--except in long clothes--until
she had glared at him and put her hand behind her back the night
she was brought into the drawing-room. She had been adroitly kept
tucked away in an attic somewhere. And now behold an addition of
several wonderful, small rooms built, furnished and decorated for
her alone, where she was to live as in a miniature palace attended
by servitors! Coombe, as a purveyor of nursery appurtenances, was
regarded with humour, the general opinion being that the eruption
of a volcano beneath his feet alone could have