She went to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father’s picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes.  It was a wonderful face—­a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence—­the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams.  Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold glass which covered it meeting her warm caressing lips with a repelling chill.  He was dead—­this father whom she could never claim!—­dead as Hugo Jocelyn, who had taken that father’s place in her life.  She might love the ghost of him if her fancy led her that way, as she loved the ghost of the “Sieur Amadis”—­but there was nothing else to love!  She was alone in the world, with neither father nor “knight of old” to protect or defend her, and on herself alone depended her future.  She turned away and left the room, looking a fragile, sad, unobtrusive little creature, with nothing about her to suggest either beauty or power.  Yet the mind in that delicate body had a strength of which she was unconscious, and she was already bending it instinctively and intellectually like a bow ready for the first shot—­with an arrow which was destined to go straight to its mark.

Meanwhile on Briar Farm there had fallen a cloud of utter desolation.  The day was fair and brilliant with summer sunshine, the birds sang, the roses bloomed, the doves flew to and fro on the gabled roof, and Innocent’s pet “Cupid” waited in vain on the corner of her window-sill for the usual summons that called it to her hand,—­but a strange darkness and silence like a whelming wave submerged the very light from the eyes of those who suddenly found themselves deprived of a beloved presence—­a personality unobtrusively sweet, which had bestowed on the old house a charm and grace far greater than had been fully recognised.  The “base-born” Innocent, nameless, and unbaptised, and therefore shadowed by the stupid scandal of commonplace convention, had given the “home” its homelike quality—­her pretty idealistic fancies about the old sixteenth-century knight “Sieur Amadis” had invested the place with a touch of romance and poetry which it would hardly have possessed with-out her—­her gentle ways, her care of the flowers and the animals, and the never-wearying delight she had taken in the household affairs—­all her part in the daily life of the farm had been as necessary to happiness as the mastership of Hugo Jocelyn himself—­and without her nothing seemed the same.  Poor Priscilla went about her work, crying silently, and Robin Clifford paced restlessly up and down the smooth grass in front of the old house with Innocent’s farewell letter in his hand, reading it again and again.  He had returned early from the market town where he had stayed the night, eager to explain to her all the details of the business he had gone through with the lawyer