The sea and the wind shrieked at him as the vessel plunged heavily on her difficult way—­his nerves, cool as they were, seemed to himself on edge:  and at certain moments during that Channel passage he felt a pang of remorse and pity for the young life on which he had cast an ineffaceable shadow,—­a life instinct with truth, beauty, and brightness, just opening out as it were into the bloom of fulfilled promise.  He had not “betrayed” her in the world’s vulgar sense of betrayal,—­he had not wronged her body—­ but he had done far worse,—­he had robbed her of her peace of mind.  Little by little he had stolen from the flower of her life its honey of sweet content,—­he had checked the active impulses of her ambition, and as they soared upwards like bright birds to the sun, had brought them down, to the ground, slain with a mere word of light mockery,—­he had led her to judge all things of no value save himself,—­and when he had attained to this end he had destroyed her last dream of happiness by voluntarily proving his own insincerity and worthlessness.

“It has all been her own fault,” he mused, trying to excuse and to console himself—­“She fell into my arms as easily as a ripe peach falls at a touch—­that childish fancy about ‘Amadis de Jocelin’ did the trick!  Curious!—­very curious that a sixteenth-century member of my own family tree should be mixed up in my affair with this girl!  Of course she’ll say nothing,—­there’s nothing to say!  We’ve kept our secret very well, and except for a few playful suggestions and hints dropped here and there, nobody knows we were in love with each other.  Then—­she’s got her work to do,—­it isn’t as if she were an idle woman without an occupation,—­and she’ll think it down and live it down.  Of course she will!  I’m worrying myself quite needlessly!  It will be all right.  And as she doesn’t go to her Briar Farm now, I daresay she’ll even forget her fetish of a knight, the ’Sieur Amadis de Jocelin’!”

He laughed idly, amused as he always had been at the romantic ideal she had made of the old French knight who had so strangely turned out to be the brother of his own far-away ancestor,—­and then, on landing at Calais, was soon absorbed in numerous other thoughts and interests, and gradually dismissed the whole subject from his mind.  After all, for him it was only one “little affair” out of at least a dozen or more, which from time to time had served to entertain him and provide a certain stimulus for his artistic emotions.

The storm had it all its own way in the fair English country,—­ sweeping in from the sea it tore over hill and dale with haste and fury, working terrible havoc among the luxuriant autumnal foliage and bringing down whirling wet showers of gold and crimson leaves.  Round Briar Farm it raged all day long, tearing away from the walls one giant branch of the old “Glory” rose and snapping it off at its stem.  Robin Clifford, coming home from the fields in the late afternoon, saw the fallen bough covered with a scented splendour of late roses, and lifting it tenderly carried it into the house, thinking somewhat sadly that in the old days Innocent would have been grieved had she seen such havoc made.  Setting it in a big brown jar full of water, he put it in the entrance hall where its shoots reached nearly to the ceiling, and Priscilla Priday exclaimed at the sight of it—­