a huge myriad-branched oak, slept the old knight Sieur Amadis de Jocelin and his English rustic wife, the founders of the Briar Farm family.  The little figure in the dark embrasure of the window clasped its white hands and turned its weeping eyes towards that ancient burial-place, and the moon-rays shone upon its fair face with a silvery glimmer, giving it an almost spectral pallor.  “Why was I ever born?” sighed a trembling voice—­“Oh, dear God!  Why did you let it be?”

The vacant air, the vacant fields looked blankly irresponsive.  They had no sympathy to give,—­they never have.  To great Mother Nature it is not important how or why a child is born, though she occasionally decides that it shall be of the greatest importance how and why the child shall live.  What does it matter to the forces of creative life whether it is brought into the world “basely,” as the phrase goes, or honourably?  The child exists,—­it is a human entity—­a being full of potential good or evil,—­and after a certain period of growth it stands alone, and its parents have less to do with it than they imagine.  It makes its own circumstances and shapes its own career, and in many cases the less it is interfered with the better.  But Innocent could not reason out her position in any cold-blooded or logical way.  She was too young and too unhappy.  Everything that she had taken pride in was swept from her at once.  Only that very morning she had made one of her many pilgrimages down to the venerable oak beneath whose trailing branches the Sieur Amadis de Jocelin lay, covered by the broad stone slab on which he had carved his own likeness, and she had put a little knot of the “Glory” roses between his mailed hands which were folded over the cross on his breast, and she had said to the silent effigy: 

“It is the last day of the haymaking, Sieur Amadis!  You would be glad to see the big crop going in if you were here!”

She was accustomed to talk to the old stone knight in this fanciful way,—­she had done so all her life ever since she could remember.  She had taken an intense pride in thinking of him as her ancestor; she had been glad to trace her lineage back over three centuries to the love-lorn French noble who had come to England in the train of the Due d’Anjou—­and now—­now she knew she had no connection at all with him,—­that she was an unnamed, unbaptised nobody—­an unclaimed waif of humanity whom no one wanted!  No one in all the world—­except Robin!  He wanted her;—­but perhaps when he knew her true history his love would grow cold.  She wondered whether it would be so.  If it were she would not mind very much.  Indeed it would be best, for she felt she could never marry him.

“No, not if I loved him with all my heart!” she said, passionately—­“Not without a name!—­not till I have made a name for myself, if only that were possible!”