He stared down upon her.

“You heard—?”

“Yes.  I was at the open window there—­I couldn’t help hearing.  It was Jenny of the Mill-Dykes—­I know her by sight, but not to speak to—­Priscilla told me something about her.  She isn’t a nice woman, is she?”

“Nice?” Robin gasped—­“No, indeed!  She is—­Well!—­I must not tell you what she is!”

“No!—­you must not—­I don’t want to hear.  But she ought to be Ned Landon’s wife—­I understood that!—­and she has a little child.  I understood that too.  And she knows everything about me—­and about that night when you climbed up on my window-sill and sat there so long.  It was a pity you did that, wasn’t it?”

“Yes!—­when there was a dirty spy in hiding!” said Robin, hotly.

“Ah!—­we never imagined such a thing could be on Briar Farm!”—­and she sighed—­“but it can’t be helped now.  Poor darling Dad!  He parted with all that money to get rid of the man he thought would do me wrong.  Oh Robin, he loved me!”

The tears gathered in her eyes and fell slowly like bright raindrops on the downy feathers of the dove she held.

“He loved you, and I love you!” murmured Robin, tenderly.  “Dear little girl, come indoors and don’t cry any more!  Your sweet eyes will be spoilt, and Uncle Hugo could never bear to see you weeping.  All the tears in the world won’t bring him back to us here,—­but we can do our best to please him still, so that if his spirit has ever been troubled, it can be at peace.  Come in and let us talk quietly together—­we must look at things squarely and straightly, and we must try to do all the things he would have wished—­”

“All except one thing,” she said, as they went together side by side into the house—­“the one thing that can never be!”

“The one thing—­the chief thing that shall be!” answered Robin, fiercely—­“Innocent, you must be my wife!”

She lifted her tear-wet eyes to his with a grave and piteous appeal which smote him to the heart by its intense helplessness and sorrow.

“Robin,—­dear Robin!” she said—­“Don’t make it harder for me than it is!  Think for a moment!  I am nameless—­a poor, unbaptised, deserted creature who was flung on your uncle’s charity eighteen years ago—­I am a stranger and intruder in this old historic place—­I have no right to be here at all—­only through your uncle’s kindness and yours.  And now things have happened so cruelly for me that I am supposed to be to you—­what I am not,”—­ and the deep colour flushed her cheeks and brow.  “I have somehow—­ through no fault of my own—­lost my name!—­though I had no name to lose—­except Innocent!—­which, as the clergyman told me, is no name for a woman.  Do you not see that if I married you, people would say it was because you were compelled to marry me?—­that you had gone too far to escape from me?—­that, in fact, we were a sort of copy of Ned Landon and Jenny of the Mill-Dykes?”

“Innocent!”