their neighbours’ lands—­though occasional flashes of bravery and chivalry had glanced over their annals in history like the light from a wandering will o’ the wisp flickering over a morass.  Gifted in his art, but wholly undisciplined in his nature, he had lived a life of selfish aims to selfish ends, and in the course of it had made love to many women,—­one especially, on whose devoted affections he had preyed like an insect that ungratefully poisons the flower from which it has sucked the honey.  This woman, driven to bay at last by his neglect and effrontery, had roused the scattered forces of her pride and had given him his conge—­and he had been looking about for a fresh victim when he met Innocent.  She was a complete novelty to him, and stimulated his more or less jaded emotions,—­he found her quaint and charming as a poet’s dream of some nymph of the woodlands,—­her manner of looking at life and the things of life was so deliciously simple—­almost mediaeval,—­for she believed that a man should die rather than break his word or imperil his honour, which to Jocelyn was such a primitive state of things as to seem prehistoric.  Then there was her fixed and absurd “fancy” about the noble qualities and manifold virtues of the French knight who had served the Duc d’Anjou,—­and who had been to her from childhood a kind of lover in the spirit,—­a being whom she had instinctively tried to serve and to please; and he had sufficient imagination to understand and take advantage of the feeling aroused in her when she had met one of the same descent, and bearing the same name, in himself.  He had run through the gamut of many emotions and sentiments,—­he had joined one or two of the new schools of atheism and modernism started by certain self-opinionated young University men, and in the earlier stages of his career had in the cock-sure impulse of youth designed schemes for the regeneration of the world, till the usual difficulties presented themselves as opposed to such vast business,—­he had associated himself with men who followed what is called the “fleshly school” of poetry and art generally, and had evolved from his own mentality a comfortable faith of which the chief tenet was “Self for Self”—­a religion which lifts the mind no higher than the purely animal plane;—­and in its environment of physical consciousness and agreeable physical sensations, he was content to live.

With such a temperament and disposition as he possessed, which swayed him hither and thither on the caprice or impulse of the moment, his intentions toward Innocent were not very clear even to himself.  When he had begun his “amour” with her he had meant it to go just as far as should satisfy his own whim and desire,—­but as he came to know her better, he put a check on himself and hesitated as one may hesitate before pulling up a rose-bush from its happy growing place and flinging it out on the dust-heap to die.  She was so utterly unsuspicious and unaware of evil, and she had placed him on so