“Me!” cried Innocent, wildly—­“oh, dear God!  It was me!”

“Yes—­it was you—­but you needn’t be tragic about it!” said Lady Blythe, calmly—­“I think, on the whole, you were fortunately placed—­and I was told where you were—­”

“You were told?—­oh, you were told!—­and you never came!  And you—­ you are—­my mother!”—­and overpowered by the shock of emotion, the girl sank back on her chair, and burying her head in her hands, sobbed bitterly.  Lady Blythe looked at her in meditative silence.

“What a tiresome creature!” she murmured, under her breath—­“Quite undisciplined!  No repose of manner—­no style whatever!  And apparently very little sense!  I think it’s a pity I came,—­a mistaken sense of duty!”

Aloud she said—­

“I hope you’re not going to cry very long!  Won’t you get it over?  I thought you would be glad to know me—­and I’ve come out of pure kindness to you, simply because I heard your old farmer was dead.  Why Pierce Armitage should have brought you to him I never could imagine—­except that once he was painting a picture in the neighbourhood and was rather taken with the history of this place —­Briar Farm isn’t it called?  You’ll make your eyes quite sore if you go on crying like that!  Yes—­I am your mother—­most unfortunately!—­I hoped you would never know it!—­but now—­as you are left quite alone in the world, I have come to see what I can do for you.”

Innocent checked her sobs, and lifting her head looked straight into the rather shallow bright eyes that regarded her with such cold and easy scrutiny.

“You can do nothing for me,” she answered, in a low voice—­“You never have done anything for me.  If you are my mother, you are an unnatural one!” And moved by a sudden, swift emotion, she stood up with indignation and scorn lighting every feature of her face.  “I was in your way at my birth—­and you were glad to be rid of me.  Why should you seek me now?”

Lady Blythe glanced her over amusedly.

“Really, you would do well on the stage!” she said—­“If you were taller, you would make your fortune with that tragic manner!  It is quite wasted on me, I assure you!  I’ve told you a very simple commonplace truth—­a thing that happens every day—­a silly couple run away together, madly in love, and deluded by the idea that love will last—­they get into trouble and have a child—­naturally, as they are not married, the child is in the way, and they get rid of it—­some people would have killed it, you know!  Your father was quite a kind-hearted person—­and his one idea was to place you where there were no other children, and where you would have a chance of being taken care of.  So he brought you to Briar Farm—­ and he told me where he had left you before he went away and died.”

“Died!” echoed the girl—­“My father is dead?”

“So I believe,”—­and Lady Blythe stifled a slight yawn—­“He was always a rather reckless person—­went out to paint pictures in all weathers, or to ‘study effects’ as he called it—­how I hated his ‘art’ talk!—­and I heard he died in Paris of influenza or pneumonia or something or other.  But as I was married then, it didn’t matter.”