arose as to whether there might not be an heiress after all, instead of an heir.  And the rustic wiseacres gossiped, as is their wont, watching with no small degree of interest the turn of events which had lately taken place in the frank and open admiration and affection displayed by Robin for his illegitimate cousin, as it was thought she was, and as Farmer Jocelyn had tacitly allowed it to be understood.  If the two young people married, everybody agreed it would be the right thing, and the best possible outlook for the continued prosperity of Briar Farm.  For after all, it was the farm that had to be chiefly considered, so they opined,—­the farm was an historic and valuable property as well as an excellent paying concern.  The great point to be attained was that it should go on as it had always gone on from the days of the Sieur Amadis, —­and that it should be kept in the possession of the same family.  This at any rate was known to be the cherished wish of old Hugo Jocelyn, though he was not given to any very free expression of his feelings.  He knew that his neighbours envied him, watched him and commented on his actions,—­he knew also that the tale he had told them concerning Innocent had to a great extent whispered away his own good name and fastened a social slur upon the girl,—­yet he could not, according to his own views, have seen any other way out of the difficulty.  The human world is always wicked-tongued; and it is common knowledge that any man or woman introducing an “adopted” child into a family is at once accused, whether he or she be conscious of the accusation or not, of passing off his own bastard under the “adoption” pretext.  Hugo Jocelyn was fairly certain that none of his neighbours would credit the romantic episode of the man on horseback arriving in a storm and leaving a nameless child on his hands.  The story was quite true,—­but truth is always precisely what people refuse to believe.

The night on which Innocent had learned her own history for the first time was a night of consummate beauty in the natural world.  When all the gates and doors of the farm and its outbuildings had been bolted and barred for the night, the moon, almost full, rose in a cloudless heaven and shed pearl-white showers of radiance all over the newly-mown and clean-swept fields, outlining the points of the old house gables and touching with luminous silver the roses that clambered up the walls.  One wide latticed window was open to the full inflowing of the scented air, and within its embrasure sat a lonely little figure in a loose white garment with hair tumbling carelessly over its shoulders and eyes that were wet with tears.  The clanging chime of the old clock below stairs had struck eleven some ten minutes since, and after the echo of its bell had died away there had followed a heavy and intense silence.  The window looked not upon the garden, but out upon the fields and a suggestive line of dark foliage edging them softly in the distance,—­away down there, under