But Innocent hesitated.

“Excuse me,” she said, with a quaint and simple dignity—­“I do not know you.  I cannot understand why you have come to see me—­if you would explain—­”

While she thus spoke Lady Blythe had surveyed her scrutinisingly through a gold-mounted lorgnon.

“Quite a proud little person it is!” she remarked, and smiled—­ “Quite proud!  I suppose I really must explain!  Only I do hope you will not make a scene.  Nothing is so unpleasant!  And such bad form!  Please sit down!”

Innocent placed a chair close to the table so that she could lean her arm on that friendly board and steady her trembling little frame.  When she was seated, Lady Blythe again looked at her critically through the lorgnon.  Then she continued—­

“Well, I must first tell you that I have always known your history—­such a romance, isn’t it!  You were brought here as a baby by a man on horseback’—­and he left you with the good old farmer who has taken care of you ever since.  I am right?  Yes!—­I’m quite sure about it—­because I knew the man—­the curious sort of parental Lochinvar!—­who got rid of you in such a curious way!”

Innocent drew a sharp breath.

“You knew him?”

Lady Blythe gave a delicate little cough.

“Yes—­I knew him—­rather well!  I was quite a girl—­and he was an artist—­a rather famous one in his way—­half French—­and very good-looking.  Yes, he certainly was remarkably good-looking!  We ran away together—­most absurd of us—­but we did.  Please don’t look at me like that!—­you remind me of Sara Bernhardt in ’La Tosca’!”

Innocent’s eyes were indeed full of something like positive terror.  Her heart beat violently—­she felt a strange dread, and a foreboding that chilled her very blood.

“People often do that kind of thing—­fall in love and run away,” continued Lady Blythe, placidly—­“when they are young and silly.  It is quite a delightful sensation, of course, but it doesn’t last.  They don’t know the world—­and they never calculate results.  However, we had quite a good time together.  We went to Devon and Cornwall, and he painted pictures and made love to me—­and it was all very nice and pretty.  Then, of course, trouble came, and we had to get out of it as best we could—­we were both tired of each other and quarrelled dreadfully, so we decided to give each other up.  Only you were in the way!”

Innocent rose, steadying herself with one hand against the table.

“I!” she exclaimed, with a kind of sob in her throat.

“Yes—­you!  Dear me,—­how you stare!  Don’t you understand?  I suppose you’ve lived such a strange sort of hermit life down here that you know nothing.  You were in the way—­you, the baby!”

“Do you mean—?”

“Yes—­I mean what you ought to have guessed at once—­if you were not as stupid as an owl!  I’ve told you I ran away with a man—­I wouldn’t marry him, though he asked me to—­I should have been tied up for life, and I didn’t want that—­so we decided to separate.  And he undertook to get rid of the baby—­”