"Why, Priscilla, you're crying!" she exclaimed—"Don't do that! Why should you cry?"
"Why indeed!" blubbered Priscilla—"Except that I'm a doiterin' fool! I can't abear the thoughts of you turnin' yer back on the good that God gives ye, an' floutin' Mr. Robin, who's the best sort o' man that ever could fall to the lot of a little tender maid like you—why, lovey, you don't know the wickedness o' this world, nor the ways of it—an' you talks about love as if it was somethin' wonderful an' far away, when here it is at yer very feet for the pickin' up! What's the good of all they books ye've bin readin' if they don't teach ye that the old knight you're fond of got so weary of the world that arter tryin' everythin' in turn he found nothin' better than to marry a plain, straight country wench and settle down in Briar Farm for all his days? Ain't that the lesson he's taught ye?"
She paused, looking hopefully at the girl through her tears—but Innocent's small fair face was pale and calm, though her eyes shone with a brilliancy as of suppressed excitement.
"No," she said—"He has not taught me that at all. He came here to 'seek forgetfulness'—so it is said in the words he carved on the panel in his study,—but we do not know that he ever really forgot. He only 'found peace,' and peace is not happiness—except for the very old."
"Peace is not happiness!" re-echoed Priscilla, staring—"That's a queer thing to say, lovey! What do you call being happy?"
"It is difficult to explain"—and a swift warm colour flew over the girl's cheeks, expressing some wave of hidden feeling—"Your idea of happiness and mine must be so different!" She smiled—"Dear, good Priscilla! You are so much more easily contented than I am!"
Priscilla looked at her with a great tenderness in her dim old grey eyes.
"See here, lovey!" she said—"You're just like a young bird on the edge of a nest ready to fly. You don't know the world nor the ways of it. Oh, my dear, it ain't all gold harvests and apples ripening rosy in the sun! You've lived all your life in the open country, and so you've always had the good God near you,—but there's places where the houses stand so close together that the sky can hardly make a patch of blue between the smoking chimneys—like London, for instance—ah!—that's where you'd find what the world's like, lovey!—where you feels so lonesome that you wonders why you ever were born—"
"I wonder that already," interrupted the girl, quickly. "Don't worry me, dear! I have so much to think about—my life seems so altered and strange—I hardly understand myself—and I don't know what I shall do with my future—but I cannot—I will not marry Robin!"
She turned away quickly then, to avoid further discussion.