Poor Innocent, who had left Briar Farm at dawn without any thought of food, and had travelled to London almost unconscious of either hunger or fatigue, was beginning to feel the lack of nourishment, and she gratefully accepted the suggestion.
"I lunch at two o'clock," continued Miss Leigh. "But it's only a little past twelve now, and if you have come a long way from the country you must be tired. I'll send Rachel up to you with some tea."
She went to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father's picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes. It was a wonderful face—a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence—the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams. Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold glass which covered it meeting her warm caressing lips with a repelling chill. He was dead—this father whom she could never claim!—dead as Hugo Jocelyn, who had taken that father's place in her life. She might love the ghost of him if her fancy led her that way, as she loved the ghost of the "Sieur Amadis"—but there was nothing else to 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. Poor Priscilla went about her work, crying silently, and Robin Clifford paced restlessly up and down the smooth grass in front of the old house with Innocent's farewell letter in his hand, reading it again and again. He had returned early from the market town where he had stayed the night, eager to explain to her all the details of the business he had gone through with the lawyer to whom his Uncle Hugo had entrusted his affairs, and to tell her how admirably everything had been arranged for the prosperous continuance of Briar Farm on the old traditional methods of labour by which it had always been worked to advantage. Hugo Jocelyn had indeed shown plenty of sound wisdom and foresight in all his plans save one—and that one was his fixed idea of Innocent's marriage with his nephew. It had evidently never occurred to him that a girl could have a will of her own in such a momentous affair—much less that she could or would be so unwise as to refuse a good husband and a settled home when both were at hand for her acceptance. Robin himself, despite her rejection of him, had still hoped and believed that when the first shock of his uncle's death had lessened, he might by patience and unwearying tenderness move her heart to softer yielding, and he had meant to plead his cause with her for the sake of the famous old house itself, so that she might become its mistress and help him to prove a worthy descendant of its long line of owners. But now! All hope was at an end—she had taken the law into her own hands and gone—no one knew whither. Priscilla was the last who had seen her—Priscilla could only explain, with many tears, that when she had gone to call her to breakfast she had found her room vacant, her bed unslept in, and the letter for Robin on the table—and that letter disclosed little or nothing of her intentions.
"Oh, the poor child!" Priscilla said, sobbingly. "All alone in a hard world, with her strange little fancies, and no one to take care of her! Oh, Mr. Robin, whatever are we to do!"
"Nothing!" and Robin's handsome face was pale and set. "We can only wait to hear from her—she will not keep us long in anxiety—she has too much heart for that. After all, it is MY fault, Priscilla! I tried to persuade her to marry me against her will—I should have let her alone."
Sudden boyish tears sprang to his eyes—he dashed them away in self-contempt.
"I'm a regular coward, you see," he said. "I could cry like a baby—not for myself so much, but to think of her running away from Briar Farm out into the wide world all alone! Little Innocent! She was safe here—and if she had wished it, I would have gone away—I would have made HER the owner of the farm, and left her in peace to enjoy it and to marry any other man she fancied. But she wouldn't listen to any plan for her own happiness since she knew she was not my uncle's daughter—that is what has changed her! I wish she had never known!"
"Ay, so do I!" agreed Priscilla, dolefully. "But she's got the fancifullest notions! All about that old stone knight in the garden—an' what wi' the things he's left carved all over the wall of the room where she read them queer old books, she's fair 'mazed with ideas that don't belong to the ways o' the world at all. I can't think what'll become o' the child. Won't there be any means of findin' out where she's gone?"
"I'm afraid not!" answered Robin, sadly. "We muse trust to her remembrance of us, Priscilla, and her thoughts of the old home where she was loved and cared for." His voice shook. "It will be a dreary place without her! We shall miss her every minute, every hour of the day! I cannot fancy what the garden will look like without her little white figure flitting over the grass, and her sweet fair face smiling among the roses! Hang it all, Priscilla, if it were not for the last wishes of my Uncle Hugo I'd throw the whole thing up and go abroad!"