With this letter his last hope died within him.  She would never be his—­never, never!  Some dim future beckoned her in which he had no part—­and he confronted the fact as a brave soldier fronts the guns, with grim endurance, aware, yet not afraid of death.

“If ever I loved her!” he thought.  “If ever I cease to love her then I shall be as stone-cold a man as her fetish of a French knight, the Sieur Amadis!  Ah, my little Innocent, in time to come you may understand what love is—­perhaps to your sorrow!—­you may need a strong defender—­and I shall be ready!  Sooner or later—­now or years hence—­if you call me, I shall answer.  I would find strength to rise from my death-bed and go to you if you wanted me!  For I love you, my little love!  I love you, and nothing can change me.  Only once in a life-time can a man love any woman as I love you!”

And with a deep vow of fidelity sworn to his secret soul he sat alone, watching the shadows of evening steal over the landscape—­ falling, falling slowly, like a gradually descending curtain upon all visible things, till Briar Farm stood spectral in the gloom like the ghost of its own departed days, and lights twinkled in the lattice windows like little eyes glittering in the dark.  Then silently bidding farewell to all his former dreams of happiness, he set himself to face “the burden and heat of the day”—­that long, long day of life so difficult to live, when deprived of love!

BOOK TWO:  HIS FACT

BOOK TWO

CHAPTER I

In London, the greatest metropolis of the world, the smallest affairs are often discussed with more keenness than things of national importance,—­and it is by no means uncommon to find society more interested in the doings of some particular man or woman than in the latest and most money-milking scheme of Government finance.  In this way it happened that about a year after Innocent had, like a small boat in a storm, broken loose from her moorings and drifted out to the wide sea, everybody who was anybody became suddenly thrilled with curiosity concerning the unknown personality of an Author.  There are so many Authors nowadays that it is difficult to get up even a show of interest in one of them,—­everybody “writes”—­from Miladi in Belgravia, who considers the story of her social experiences, expressed in questionable grammar, quite equal to the finest literature, down to the stable-boy who essays a “prize” shocker for a penny dreadful.  But this latest aspirant to literary fame had two magnetic qualities which seldom fail to arouse the jaded spirit of the reading public,—­novelty and mystery, united to that scarce and seldom recognised power called genius.  He or she had produced a Book.  Not an ephemeral piece of fiction,—­not a “Wells” effort of imagination under hydraulic pressure—­not