go on as it had always gone on from the days of the Sieur Amadis,
--and that it should be kept in the possession of the same family.
This at any rate was known to be the cherished wish of old Hugo
Jocelyn, though he was not given to any very free expression of
his feelings. He knew that his neighbours envied him, watched him
and commented on his actions,--he knew also that the tale he had
told them concerning Innocent had to a great extent whispered away
his own good name and fastened a social slur upon the girl,--yet
he could not, according to his own views, have seen any other way
out of the difficulty. The human world is always wicked-tongued;
and it is common knowledge that any man or woman introducing an
"adopted" child into a family is at once accused, whether he or
she be conscious of the accusation or not, of passing off his own
bastard under the "adoption" pretext. Hugo Jocelyn was fairly
certain that none of his neighbours would credit the romantic
episode of the man on horseback arriving in a storm and leaving a
nameless child on his hands. The story was quite true,--but truth
is always precisely what people refuse to believe.

The night on which Innocent had learned her own history for the
first time was a night of consummate beauty in the natural world.
When all the gates and doors of the farm and its outbuildings had
been bolted and barred for the night, the moon, almost full, rose
in a cloudless heaven and shed pearl-white showers of radiance all
over the newly-mown and clean-swept fields, outlining the points
of the old house gables and touching with luminous silver the
roses that clambered up the walls. One wide latticed window was
open to the full inflowing of the scented air, and within its
embrasure sat a lonely little figure in a loose white garment with
hair tumbling carelessly over its shoulders and eyes that were wet