“Eh, eh, is the old rose-tree broken, Mister Robin!  That’s never happened before in all the time I’ve been ’ere!  I don’t like the looks of it!—­no, Mister Robin, I don’t!”

“It’s only one of the bigger branches,” answered Robin soothingly.  “The rose-tree itself is all right—­I don’t think any storm can hurt that—­it’s too deeply rooted.  This was certainly a very fine branch, but it must have got loosened by the wind.”

Even as he spoke a fierce gust swept over the old house with a sound like a scream of wrath and agony, and a furious torrent of rain emptied itself as though from a cloud-burst, half drowning the flower-beds and for the moment making a pool of the court-yard.  Priscilla hurried to see that all the windows were shut and the doors well barred, and when evening closed in the picturesque gables of the roof were but a black blur in the almost incessant whirl of rain.

As the night deepened the storm grew worse, and the howling of the wind through the cracks and crannies of the ancient building was like the noise of wild animals clamouring for food.  Priscilla and Robin Clifford sat together in the kitchen,—­the most comfortable apartment to be in on such an unkind night of elemental uproar.  It had become more or less their living-room since Innocent’s departure, for Robin could not bear to sit in the “best parlour,” as it was called, now that there was no one to share its old-world charm and comfort with him,—­and when Priscilla’s work was done, and everything was cleared and the other servants gone to their beds, he preferred to bring his book and pipe into the kitchen, and sit in an old cushioned arm-chair on one side of the fire-place, while Priscilla sat on the other, mending the house-linen, both of them talking at intervals of the past, and of the happy and unthinking days when Farmer Jocelyn had been alive and well, and when Innocent was like a fairy child flitting over the meadows with her light and joyous movements, her brown-gold hair flying loose like a trail of sunbeams on the wind, her face blossoming into rose-and-white loveliness as a flower blossoms on its slender stem,—­her voice carrying sweet cadences through the air and making music wherever it rang.  Latterly, however, they had not spoken so much of her,—­the fame of her genius and the sudden leap she had made into a position of public note and brilliancy had somewhat scared the simple soul of Priscilla, who felt that the child she had reared from infancy had been taken by some strange and not to be contested fate away, far out of her reach,—­while Robin—­whose experiences at Oxford had taught him that persons of his own sex attaining to even a mild literary celebrity were apt to become somewhat “touch-me-not” characters—­almost persuaded himself that perhaps Innocent, sweet and ideally simple of nature as he had ever known her to be, might, under the influence of her rapid success and prosperity, change a little (and such change, he