“Amadis!” The voice was thin and faint, but exquisitely tender.  “Amadis!  How kind you are!  Ah, yes!—­at last!—­I was sure you did not mean to be cruel—­I knew you would come back and be good to me again!  My Amadis!—­You are good!—­you could not be anything else but good and true!” She laughed weakly and went on more rapidly—­ “It is raining—­yes!  Oh, yes—­raining very much!—­such a cold, sharp rain!  I’ve walked quite a long way—­but I felt I must come back to you, Amadis!—­just to ask you once more to say a kind word-to kiss me...”

She closed her eyes again and her head fell back on the pillow of the chair in which she lay.  Priscilla’s heart sank.

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about, poor lamb!” she thought,—­“Just wandering and off her head!—­and fancying things about that old French knight again!”

Here Robin entered, and stood a moment, lost in a maze of enchanted misery at the sight of the pitiful little half-disrobed figure in the chair, till Priscilla took the white garment he had been sent to fetch out of his passive hand.

“There, dear lad, don’t look like that!” she said.  “Go, and come back in a few minutes with the wine—­we’ll be ready for you then.  Cheer up!—­she’s opened her pretty eyes once—­she’ll open them again directly and smile at you!”

He moved away slowly with an aching heart, and a tightness in his throat that impelled him to cry like a woman.  Innocent!—­little Innocent!—­she who had once been all brightness and gaiety,—­was this desolate, half-dying, stricken creature the same girl?  Ah, no!  Not the same!  Never the same any more!  Some numbing blow had smitten her,—­some withering fire had swept over her, and she was no longer what she once had been.  This he felt by a lover’s intuition,—­intuition keener and surer than all positive knowledge; and not the faintest hope stirred within him that she would ever shake off the trance of that death-in-life into which she had been plunged by some as yet unknown disaster—­unknown to him, yet dimly guessed.  Meanwhile Priscilla’s loving task was soon done, and Innocent was clothed, warm and dry, in one of the old hand-woven woollen gowns she had been accustomed to wear in former days, and a thick blanket was wrapped cosily round her.  She was still more or less unconscious, but the reviving heat gradually penetrated her body, and she began to sigh and move restlessly.  She opened her eyes again and fixed them on the bright fire.  Robin came in with the glass of wine, and Priscilla held it to her lips, forcing her to swallow a few drops.

The strong cordial started a little pulse of warmth in her failing blood, and she made an effort to sit up.  She looked vaguely round her,—­then her wandering gaze fixed itself on Priscilla’s anxious old face, and a faint smile, more pitiful than tears, trembled on her lips.

“Priscilla!” she said—­“I believe it is Priscilla I Oh, dear Priscilla!  I called you but you would not hear or answer me!”