Lady Blythe’s face grew ghastly pale in the uncertain light of the half-veiled moon.  She moved a step and caught the girl’s arm with some violence.

“What do you mean to do?” she asked, in an angry whisper, “I must know!  What are your plans of vengeance?—­your campaign of notoriety?—­your scheme of self-advertisement?  What claim will you make?”

“None!” and Innocent looked at her fully, with calm and fearless dignity.  “I have no claim upon you, thank God!  I am less to you than a dropped lamb, lost in a thicket of thorns, is to the sheep that bore it!  That’s a rough country simile,—­I was brought up on a farm, you know!—­but it will serve your case.  Think nothing of me, as I think nothing of you!  What I am, or what I may be to the world, is my own affair!”

There was a pause.  Presently Lady Blythe gave a kind of shrill hysterical laugh.

“Then, when we meet in society, as we have met to-night, it will be as comparative strangers?”

“Why, of course!—­we have always been strangers,” the girl replied, quietly.  “No strangers were ever more strange to each other than we!”

“You mean to keep my secret?—­and your own?”

“Certainly.  Do you suppose I would give my father’s name to slander?”

“Your father!—­you talk of your father as if he was worth consideration!—­he was chiefly to blame for your position—­”

“Was he?  I am not quite sure of that,” said Innocent, slowly—­“I do not know all the circumstances.  But I have heard that he was a great artist; and that some woman he loved ruined his life.  And I believe you are that woman!”

Lady Blythe laughed—­a hard mirthless laugh.

“Believe what you like!” she said—­“You are an imaginative little fool!  When you know more of the world you will find out that men ruin women’s lives as casually as cracking nuts, but they take jolly good care of their own skins!  Pierce Armitage was too selfish a man to sacrifice his own pleasure and comfort for anyone—­he was glad to get rid of me—­and of you!  And now—­now!” She threw up her hands with an expressive, half-tragic gesture.  “Now you are famous!—­actually famous!  Good heavens!—­why, I thought you would stay in that old farmhouse all your life, scrubbing the floors and looking after the poultry, and perhaps marrying some good-natured country yokel!  Famous!—­you!—­with social London dancing attendance on you!  What a ghastly comedy!” She laughed again.  “Come!—­we must go back to the house.”

They walked side by side—­the dark full-figured woman and the fair slight girl—­the one a mere ephemeral unit in an exclusively aristocratic and fashionable “set,”—­the other, the possessor of a sudden brilliant fame which was spreading a new light across the two hemispheres.  Not another word was exchanged between them, and as they re-entered the ducal reception-rooms, now more crowded than ever, Lord Blythe met them.