She paused, looking hopefully at the girl through her tears—­but Innocent’s small fair face was pale and calm, though her eyes shone with a brilliancy as of suppressed excitement.

“No,” she said—­“He has not taught me that at all.  He came here to ’seek forgetfulness’—­so it is said in the words he carved on the panel in his study,—­but we do not know that he ever really forgot.  He only ‘found peace,’ and peace is not happiness—­except for the very old.”

“Peace is not happiness!” re-echoed Priscilla, staring—­“That’s a queer thing to say, lovey!  What do you call being happy?”

“It is difficult to explain”—­and a swift warm colour flew over the girl’s cheeks, expressing some wave of hidden feeling—­“Your idea of happiness and mine must be so different!” She smiled—­ “Dear, good Priscilla!  You are so much more easily contented than I am!”

Priscilla looked at her with a great tenderness in her dim old grey eyes.

“See here, lovey!” she said—­“You’re just like a young bird on the edge of a nest ready to fly.  You don’t know the world nor the ways of it.  Oh, my dear, it ain’t all gold harvests and apples ripening rosy in the sun!  You’ve lived all your life in the open country, and so you’ve always had the good God near you,—­but there’s places where the houses stand so close together that the sky can hardly make a patch of blue between the smoking chimneys—­like London, for instance—­ah!—­that’s where you’d find what the world’s like, lovey!—­where you feels so lonesome that you wonders why you ever were born—­”

“I wonder that already,” interrupted the girl, quickly.  “Don’t worry me, dear!  I have so much to think about—­my life seems so altered and strange—­I hardly understand myself—­and I don’t know what I shall do with my future—­but I cannot—­I will not marry Robin!”

She turned away quickly then, to avoid further discussion.

A little later she went into the quaint oak-panelled room where the fateful disclosures of the past night had been revealed to her.  Here breakfast was laid, and the latticed window was set wide open, admitting the sweet scent of stocks and mignonette with every breath of the morning air.  She stood awhile looking out on the gay beauty of the garden, and her eyes unconsciously filled with tears.

“Dear home!” she murmured—­“Home that is not mine—­that never will be mine!  How I have loved you!—­how I shall always love you!”

A slow step behind her interrupted her meditations—­and she looked around with a smile as timid as it was tender.  There was her “Dad”—­the same as ever,—­yet now to her mind so far removed from her that she hesitated a moment before giving him her customary good-morning greeting.  A pained contraction of his brow showed her that he felt this little difference, and she hastened to make instant amends.

“Dear Dad!” she said, softly,—­and she put her soft arms about him and kissed his cheek—­“How are you this morning?  Did you sleep well?”