Then a sudden thought flew across her brain of Ned Landon.  The tall powerful-looking brute loved her, she knew.  Every look of his told her that his very soul pursued her with a reckless and relentless passion.  She hated him,—­she trembled even now as she pictured his dark face and burning eyes;—­he had annoyed and worried her in a thousand ways—­ways that were not sufficiently open in their offence to be openly complained of, though had Farmer Jocelyn’s state of health given her less cause for anxiety she might have said something to him which would perhaps have opened his eyes to the situation.  But not now,—­not now could she appeal to anyone for protection from amorous insult.  For who was she—­what was she that she should resent it?  She was nothing!—­a mere stray child whose parents nobody knew,—­without any lawful guardian to uphold her rights or assert her position.  No wonder old Jocelyn had called her “wilding”—­she was indeed a “wilding” or weed,—­growing up unwanted in the garden of the world, destined to be pulled out of the soil where she had nourished and thrown contemptuously aside.  A wretched sense of utter helplessness stole over her,—­of incapacity, weakness and loneliness.  She tried to think,—­to see her way through the strange fog of untoward circumstance that had so suddenly enshrouded her.  What would happen when Farmer Jocelyn died?  For one thing she would have to quit Briar Farm.  She could not stay in it when Robin Clifford was its master.  He would marry, of course; he would be sure to marry; and there would be no place for her in his home.  She would have to earn her bread; and the only way to do that would be to go out to service.  She had a good store of useful domestic knowledge,—­she could bake and brew, and wash and scour; she knew how to rear poultry and keep bees; she could spin and knit and embroider; indeed her list of household accomplishments would have startled any girl fresh out of a modern Government school, where things that are useful in life are frequently forgotten, and things that are not by any means necessary are taught as though they were imperative.  One other accomplishment she had,—­one that she hardly whispered to herself—­she could write,—­write what she herself called “nonsense.”  Scores of little poems and essays and stories were locked away in a small old bureau in a corner of the room,—­ confessions and expressions of pent-up feeling which, but for this outlet, would have troubled her brain and hindered her rest.  They were mostly, as she frankly admitted to her own conscience, in the “style” of the Sieur Amadis, and were inspired by his poetic suggestions.  She had no fond or exaggerated idea of their merit,—­ they were the result of solitary hours and long silences in which she had felt she must speak to someone,—­exchange thoughts with someone,—­or suffer an almost intolerable restraint.  That “someone” was for her the long dead knight who had come to England in the train of the Duc d’Anjou.  To him