And her eyes would flash, and her sensitive mouth would quiver as the vision of fame like a mystical rainbow circled the heaven of her youthful imagination—­while Miss Leigh would sigh, and listen and wonder,—­she, whose simple hope and faith had been centred in a love which had proved false and vain,—­praying that the girl might realise her ambition without the wreckage and disillusion of her life.

One evening—­an evening destined to mark a turning-point in Innocent’s destiny—­they went together to an “At Home” held at a beautiful studio in the house of an artist deservedly famous.  Miss Leigh had a great taste for pictures, no doubt fostered since the early days of her romantic attachment to a man who had painted them,—­and she knew most of the artists whose names were more or less celebrated in the modern world.  Her host on this special occasion was what is called a “fashionable” portrait painter,—­ from the Queen downwards he had painted the “counterfeit presentments” of ladies of wealth and title, flattering them as delicately as his really clever brush would allow, and thereby securing golden opinions as well as golden guineas.  He was a genial, breezy sort of man,—­quite without vanity or any sort of “art” ostentation, and he had been a friend of Miss Leigh’s for many years.  Innocent loved going to his studio whenever her “godmother” would take her, and he, in his turn, found interest and amusement in talking to a girl who showed such a fresh, simple and unworldly nature, united to intelligence and perception far beyond her years.  On the particular evening in question the studio was full of notable people,—­not uncomfortably crowded, but sufficiently so as to compose a brilliant effect of colour and movement—­beautiful women in wonderful attire fluttered to and fro like gaily-plumaged birds among the conventionally dark-clothed men who stood about in that aimless fashion they so often affect when disinclined to talk or to make themselves agreeable,—­and there was a pleasantly subdued murmur of voices,—­cultured voices, well-attuned, and incapable of breaking into the sheep-like snigger or asinine bray.  Innocent, keeping close beside her “god-mother,” watched the animated scene with happy interest, unconscious that many of those present watched her in turn with a good deal of scarcely restrained curiosity.  For, somehow or other, rumour had whispered a flying word or two that it was possible she—­even she—­that young, childlike-looking creature—­might be, and probably was the actual author of the clever book everybody was talking about, and though no one had the hardihood to ask her point-blank if the report was true, people glanced at her inquisitively and murmured their “asides” of suggestion or incredulity, finding it difficult to believe that a woman could at any time or by any means, alone and unaided, snatch one flower from the coronal of fame.  She looked very fair and sweet and non-literary, clad in a simple white gown made of some softly clinging