the charming humility of a docile and obedient spirit all too rare in these days when youth is more full of effrontery than modesty.  She had managed her “literary” business so far well and carefully, representing herself as the private secretary of an author who wished to remain anonymous, and who had gone abroad, entrusting her with his manuscript to “place” with any suitable firm that would make a suitable offer.  The ruse would hardly have succeeded in the case of any ordinary piece of work, but the book itself was of too exceptional a quality to be passed over, and the firm to which it was first offered recognised this and accepted it without parley, astute enough to see its possibilities and to risk its chances of success.  And now she realised that her little plot might be discovered any day, and that she would have to declare herself as the writer of a strange and brilliant book which was the talk of the moment.

“I wonder what they will say when they know it at Briar Farm!” she thought, with a smile and a half sigh.

Briar Farm seemed a long way off in these days.  She had written occasionally both to Priscilla and Robin Clifford; giving her address and briefly stating that she had taken the name of Armitage, feeling that she had no right to that of Jocelyn.  But Priscilla could not write, and contented herself with sending her “dear love and duty and do come back soon,” through Robin, who answered for both in letters that were carefully cold and restrained.  Now that he knew where she was he made no attempt to visit her,—­he was too grieved and disappointed at her continued absence, and deeply hurt at what he considered her “quixotic” conduct in adopting a different name,—­an “alias” as he called it.

“You have separated yourself from your old home by your own choice in more ways than one,” he wrote, “and I see I have no right to criticise your actions.  You are in a strange place and you have taken a strange name,—­I cannot feel that you are Innocent,—­the Innocent of our bygone happy years!  It is better I should not go and see you—­not unless you send for me, when, of course, I will come.”

She was both glad and sorry for this,—­she would have liked to see him again, and yet!—­well!—­she knew instinctively that if they met, it would only cause him fresh unhappiness.  Her new life had bestowed new grace on her personality—­all the interior intellectual phases of her mind had developed in her a beauty of face and form which was rare, subtle and elusive, and though she was not conscious of it herself, she had that compelling attraction about her which few can resist,—­a fascination far greater than mere physical perfection.  No one could have called her actually beautiful,—­hardly could it have been said she was even “pretty”—­but in her slight figure and intelligent face with its large blue-grey eyes half veiled under dreamy, drooping lids and long lashes, there was a magnetic charm which was both sweet and powerful.  Moreover, she dressed