She looked up with a serious, sweet luminance in her eyes—­and he was suddenly thrilled by her glance, and moved by a desire to turn her romantic idyll into something of reality.  This feeling was merely the physical one of an amorously minded man,—­he knew, or thought he knew, women well enough to hold them at no higher estimate than that of sex-attraction,—­yet, with all the cynicism he had attained through long experience of the world and its ways, he recognised a charm in this fair little creature that was strange and new and singularly fascinating, while the exquisite modulations of her voice as she told the story of the old French knight, so simply yet so eloquently, gave her words the tenderness of a soft song well sung.

“A pity you should waste fondness on a man of stone!” he said, lightly, bending his keen steel-blue eyes on hers.  “But what you tell me is most curious, for your ‘Sieur Amadis’ must be the missing branch of my own ancestral tree.  May I explain?—­or will it bore you?”

She gave him a swift, eager glance.

“Bore me?” she echoed—­“How could it?  Oh, do please let me know everything—­quickly!”

He smiled at her enthusiasm.

“We’ll sit down here out of the crowd,” he said,—­and, taking her arm gently, he guided her to a retired corner of the studio which was curtained off to make a cosy and softly cushioned recess.  “You have told me half a romance!  Perhaps I can supply the other half.”  He paused, looking at her, whimsically pleased to see the warm young blood flushing her cheeks as he spoke, and her eyes drooping under his penetrating gaze.  “Long, long ago—­as you put it—­in the days of good Queen Bess, there lived a certain Hugo de Jocelin, a nobleman of France, famed for fierce deeds of arms, and for making himself generally disagreeable to his neighbours with whom he was for ever at cross-purposes.  This contentious personage had two sons,—­Jeffrey and Amadis,—­also knights-at-arms, inheriting the somewhat excitable nature of their father; and the younger of these, Amadis, whose name I bear, was selected by the Duc d’Anjou to accompany him with his train of nobles and gentles, when that ‘petit grenouille’ as he called himself, went to England to seek Queen Elizabeth’s hand in marriage.  The Duke failed in his ambitious quest, as we all know, and many of his attendants got scattered and dispersed,—­among them Amadis, who was entirely lost sight of, and never returned again to the home of his fathers.  He was therefore supposed to be dead—­”

“My Amadis!” murmured Innocent, her eyes shining like stars as she listened.

“Your Amadis!—­yes!” And his voice softened.  “Of course he must have been your Amadis!—­your ‘Knight of old and warrior bold!’ Well!  None of his own people ever heard of him again—­and in the family tree he is marked as missing.  But Jeffrey stayed at home in France,—­and in due course inherited his father’s grim old castle and lands.  He married, and had a large family,—­much larger than the six olive-branches allotted to your friend of Briar Farm,”—­ and he smiled.  “He, Jeffrey, is my ancestor, and I can trace myself back to him in direct lineage, so you see I have quite the right to my curious name!”