She lifted the painter’s palette and looked curiously at it,—­then took up the brush, moist with colour, which Jocelyn had lately used.  Softly she kissed its handle and laid it down again.  Then she waited, with a puzzled air, and listened.  There was no sound.  Another moment, and she moved noiselessly, almost creepingly to the little private door by which she had always entered the studio, and unlocking it, slipped out leaving the key in the lock.  It was raining heavily, but she was not conscious of this,—­she had no very clear idea what she was doing.  There was a curious calm upon her,—­a kind of cold assertiveness, like that of a dying person who has strength enough to ask for some dear friend’s presence before departing from life.  She walked steadily to the place where her motor-brougham waited for her, and entered it.  The chauffeur looked at her for orders.

“To Paddington Station,” she said—­“I am going out of town.  Stop at the first telegraph office on your way.”

The man touched his hat.  He thought she seemed very ill, but it was his place to obey instructions, not to proffer sympathy.  At the telegraph office she got out, moving like one in a dream and sent a wire to Miss Leigh.

“Am staying with friends out of town.  Don’t wait up for me.”

Back to the brougham she went, still in a dream-like apathy, and at Paddington dismissed the chauffeur.

“If I want you in the morning, I will let you know,” she said, with matter-of-fact composure, and turning, was lost at once in the crowd of passengers pouring into the station.

The man was for a moment puzzled by the paleness of her face and the wildness of her eyes, but like most of his class, made little effort to think beyond the likelihood of everything being “all right to-morrow,” and went his way.

Meanwhile Miss Leigh had returned to her house to find it bereft of its living sunshine.  There were two telegrams awaiting her,—­ one from Lord Blythe, urging her to start at once with Innocent for Italy—­the other from Innocent herself, which alarmed her by its unusual purport.  In all the time she had lived with her “god-mother” the girl had never stayed away a night, and that she was doing so now worried and perplexed the old lady to an acute degree of nervous anxiety.  John Harrington happened to call that evening, and on hearing what had occurred, became equally anxious with herself, and, moved by some curious instinct, went, on his way home, to Jocelyn’s studio to ascertain if Innocent had been there that afternoon.  But he knocked and rang at the door in vain,—­all was dark and silent.  Amadis de Jocelyn was a wise man in his generation.  When he had returned to confront Innocent again and find her, as he had suggested, either recovered from her “temper” and “calm and reasonable”—­or else “gone”—­he had rejoiced to see that she had accepted the latter alternative.  There was no trace of her save the unlocked private door of the studio, which he now locked, putting the key in his pocket.  He gave a long breath of relief—­a sort of “Thank God that’s over!”—­and arranged his affairs of both art and business with such dispatch as to leave for Paris in peace and comfort by the night boat-train.