Her eyes filled with an eager light.

“What do you mean?”

He laughed,—­yet in himself was conscious of a certain embarrassment.

“Well!—­that a certain ‘Innocent’ young lady is a great author!” he said—­“There!  You have it!  I’m loth to believe it, and hope the report isn’t true, for I’m afraid of clever women!  Indeed I avoid them whenever I can!”

A sudden sense of hopelessness and loss fell over her like a cloud—­her lips quivered.

“Why should you do so?” she asked—­“We do not avoid clever men!”

He smiled.

“Ah!  That is different!”

She was silent.  Miss Leigh looked a little distressed.

He went on lightly.

“My dear Miss Armitage, don’t be angry with me!” he said—­“You are so delightfully ignorant of the ways of our sex, and I for one heartily wish you might always remain so!  But we men are proverbially selfish-and we like to consider cleverness, or ‘genius’ if you will, as our own exclusive property.  We hate the feminine poacher on our particular preserves!  We consider that women were made to charm and to amuse us—­not to equal us.  Do you see?  When a woman is clever—­perhaps cleverer than we are—­she ceases to be amusing—­and we must be amused!  We cannot have our fun spoiled by the blue-stocking element,—­though you—­you do not look in the least ’blue’!”

She turned from him in a mute vexation.  She thought his talk trifling and unmanly.  Miss Leigh came to the rescue.

“No—­Innocent is certainly not ‘blue,’” she said, sweetly—­“If by that term you mean ‘advanced’ or in any way unwomanly.  But she has been singularly gifted by nature—­yes, dear child, I must be allowed to speak!”—­this, as Innocent made an appealing gesture,—­ “and if people say she is the author of the book that is just now being so much talked of, they are only saying the truth.  The secret cannot be kept much longer.”

He heard—­then went quickly up to the girl where she stood in a somewhat dejected attitude near his easel.

“Then it is true!” he said—­“I heard it yesterday from an old journalist friend of mine, John Harrington—­but I couldn’t quite believe it.  Let me congratulate you on your brilliant success—­”

“You do not care!” she said, almost in a whisper.

“Oh, do I not?” He was amused, and taking her hand kissed it lightly.  “If all literary women were like you—­”

He left the sentence unfinished, but his eyes conveyed a wordless language which made her heart beat foolishly and her nerves thrill.  She forgot the easy mockery which had distinguished his manner since when speaking of the “blue-stocking element"-and once more “Amadis de Jocelyn” sat firmly on her throne of the ideal!

That very afternoon, on her return from Jocelyn’s studio to Miss Leigh’s little house in Kensington which she now called her “home”—­she found a reply-paid telegram from her publishers, running thus: