with tears. The clanging chime of the old clock below stairs had
struck eleven some ten minutes since, and after the echo of its
bell had died away there had followed a heavy and intense silence.
The window looked not upon the garden, but out upon the fields and
a suggestive line of dark foliage edging them softly in the
distance,--away down there, under a huge myriad-branched oak,
slept the old knight Sieur Amadis de Jocelin and his English
rustic wife, the founders of the Briar Farm family. The little
figure in the dark embrasure of the window clasped its white hands
and turned its weeping eyes towards that ancient burial-place, and
the moon-rays shone upon its fair face with a silvery glimmer,
giving it an almost spectral pallor. "Why was I ever born?" sighed
a trembling voice--"Oh, dear God! Why did you let it be?"

The vacant air, the vacant fields looked blankly irresponsive.
They had no sympathy to give,--they never have. To great Mother
Nature it is not important how or why a child is born, though she
occasionally decides that it shall be of the greatest importance
how and why the child shall live. What does it matter to the
forces of creative life whether it is brought into the world
"basely," as the phrase goes, or honourably? The child exists,--it
is a human entity--a being full of potential good or evil,--and
after a certain period of growth it stands alone, and its parents
have less to do with it than they imagine. It makes its own
circumstances and shapes its own career, and in many cases the
less it is interfered with the better. But Innocent could not
reason out her position in any cold-blooded or logical way. She
was too young and too unhappy. Everything that she had taken pride
in was swept from her at once. Only that very morning she had made
one of her many pilgrimages down to the venerable oak beneath