Innocent blushed.

“Perhaps it was wrong to say what was not true,” she said, “but really I was and am the secretary of the author!—­I write all the manuscript with my own hand!”

They laughed at this, and then Harrington went on to say—­

“I believe you know the painter Amadis Jocelyn, don’t you?  Yes?  Well, I was with him the other day, and I said you were the author of the wonderful book.  He told me I was talking nonsense—­that you couldn’t be,—­he had met you at an artist’s evening party and that you had told him a story about some ancestor of his own family.  ‘She’s a nice little thing with baby eyes,’ he said, ’but she couldn’t write a clever book!  She may have got some man to write it for her!’”

Innocent gave a little cry of pain.

“Oh!—­did he say that?”

“Of course he did!  All men say that sort of thing!  They can’t bear a woman to do more than marry and have children.  Simple girl with the satchel, don’t you know that?  You mustn’t mind it—­it’s their way.  Of course I rounded on Jocelyn and told him he was a fool, with a swelled head on the subject of his own sex—­he is a fool in many ways,—­he’s a great painter, but he might be much greater if he’d get up early in the morning and stick to his work.  He ought to have been in the front rank long ago.”

“But surely he is in the front rank?” queried Miss Leigh, mildly—­ “He is a wonderful artist!”

“Wonderful—­yes!—­with a lot of wonderful things in him which haven’t come out!” declared Harrington, “and which never will come out, I fear!  He turns night into day too often.  Oh, he’s clever!—­ I grant you all that—­but he hasn’t a resolute will or a great mind, like Watts or Burne-Jones or any of the fellows who served their art nobly—­he’s a selfish sort of chap!”

Innocent heard, and longed to utter a protest—­she wanted to say-“No, no!—­you wrong him!  He is good and noble—­he must be!—­he is Amadis de Jocelyn!”

But she repressed her thought and sat very quiet,—­then, when Harrington paused, she told him in a sweet, even voice the story of the “Knight of France” who founded Briar Farm.  He was enthralled—­not so much by the tale as by her way of telling it.

“And so Jocelyn the painter is the lineal descendant of the brother of your Jocelin!—­the knight who disappeared and took to farming in the days of Elizabeth!” he said—­“Upon my word, it’s a quaint bit of history and coincidence—­almost too romantic for such days as these!”

Innocent smiled.

“Is romance at an end now?” she asked.

Harrington looked at her kindly.

“Almost!  It’s gasping its last gasp in company with poetry.  Realism is our only wear—­Realism and Prose—­very prosy Prose.  You are a romantic child!—­I can see that!—­but don’t over-do it!  And if you ever made an ideal out of your sixteenth-century man, don’t make another out of the twentieth-century one!  He couldn’t stand it!—­he’d crumble at a touch!”