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.