love! She was alone in the world, with neither father nor "knight
of old" to protect or defend her, and on herself alone depended
her future. She turned away and left the room, looking a fragile,
sad, unobtrusive little creature, with nothing about her to
suggest either beauty or power. Yet the mind in that delicate body
had a strength of which she was unconscious, and she was already
bending it instinctively and intellectually like a bow ready for
the first shot--with an arrow which was destined to go straight to
its mark.

Meanwhile on Briar Farm there had fallen a cloud of utter
desolation. The day was fair and brilliant with summer sunshine,
the birds sang, the roses bloomed, the doves flew to and fro on
the gabled roof, and Innocent's pet "Cupid" waited in vain on the
corner of her window-sill for the usual summons that called it to
her hand,--but a strange darkness and silence like a whelming wave
submerged the very light from the eyes of those who suddenly found
themselves deprived of a beloved presence--a personality
unobtrusively sweet, which had bestowed on the old house a charm
and grace far greater than had been fully recognised. The "base-
born" Innocent, nameless, and unbaptised, and therefore shadowed
by the stupid scandal of commonplace convention, had given the
"home" its homelike quality--her pretty idealistic fancies about
the old sixteenth-century knight "Sieur Amadis" had invested the
place with a touch of romance and poetry which it would hardly
have possessed with-out her--her gentle ways, her care of the
flowers and the animals, and the never-wearying delight she had
taken in the household affairs--all her part in the daily life of
the farm had been as necessary to happiness as the mastership of
Hugo Jocelyn himself--and without her nothing seemed the same.