the trees in the park. Have you also any remembrance, however slight,
how I looked when we were little children playing together at home?"

"I don't know for sure," Robin replied, while for an instant a deep
flush stained his pale cheeks: "I don't know for sure. Sometimes out of
those dim shadows of the past which I have struggled so hard to retain,
there comes a vision of a little girl--or, rather, there is a picture
which comes before my mind more distinct than the grass, and the trees,
and the flowers, though I always try to put it away; but it repeats
itself over and over again, and I see it in my dreams so vividly, and
especially of late, when life is slipping from me."

"What is the picture?" Lucy said, and her face was whiter than the one
above her.

"It is this," Robin replied. "I seem to see myself looking up, with
outstretched arms, toward a little girl who is standing above me,
looking down at me with a face which cannot--cannot be the one I shall
welcome to heaven and know as my sister's; for this in the picture has a
cruel expression on it, and there is hatred in the eyes, which are so
large and black, and stare so fixedly at me. Then there is a crash, and
darkness, and a horrible pain, and loud cries, and the eyes fade away in
the blackness, and I know no more till you are sobbing over me and
begging me to say that I can see you. I remember that, I am sure, or
else it has been told me so often that it seems as if I did; but the
other, the face above me, is all a fancy and a delusion of the brain.
You never looked at me that way--never could."

Here he paused, and the girl beside him withdrew herself from him, and
clasping her hands tightly together, knelt abjectly at his feet as she