“You won’t give in?” said Frederick. “You are just like all women. You will never allow you are in the wrong. When I come home, fretted and vexed from the world,” continued the young man, taking a high tone, “and hoping to have a little repose and comfort at home, you begin to worry me from the first moment you catch sight of me. I declare it is hard; a man who has always tried to do his duty at home--and instead of finding it a refuge from the troubles of life----” This speech was perfectly unintelligible to Innocent. She looked up at him with vague surprise, being quite unaware, poor child, of the troubles of life from which Frederick escaped with the hope of finding comfort at home. He had fallen without thinking into the ordinary and conventional manner in which manhood indignant addresses its womankind. He pulled himself up suddenly with a “pshaw!” of disgust, which could only be addressed to himself. “I mean you must put a stop to all this nonsense,” he said abruptly. “Make yourself happy somehow. Do as other people do. Don’t sit and mope in a corner and gaze at me, and don’t watch for me any more at that window. If you do, I shall be horribly vexed. There now, run in and think no more of it. I don’t mean to be cross; but you must remember, Innocent,” he concluded with great emphasis, “you must remember that what you have got to do is to please, not yourself, but me.” Innocent received this first lesson in the female necessity of self-renunciation in silence, taking it in with her eyes as well as her ears. She kept looking at him, in the dulness of her perception, wondering if there was something more to follow; but nothing followed. Then she said “Yes” vaguely, and they went in together, he to the drawing-room, where he had his mother to encounter, she to the schoolroom, high up in the roof, which she had taken possession of to sit and dream in. Girls seldom have their lesson so very plainly put forth to them in words, but perhaps Innocent’s undeveloped mind required it. “What you have to do is to please, not yourself, but me!” She pondered the words, and got to the length of mastering their meaning without any criticism. Such plainspeaking has in it a certain sublimity, surmounting all secondary shades of meaning, and penetrating into the simplest soul. She got it by heart, seated on her window-ledge, looking out upon the little chapel, which once more had caught something of the aspect of the church of the Spina. “Not yourself, but me; not yourself, but me!” Thus Innocent got her first great lesson by heart. CHAPTER XIX. THE FLOWER OF STERBORNE. I do not know if any prevision of the fate which was about to befall him was in Frederick’s mind on that eventful night. He had a few words with his mother, which were not altogether friendly, ere he went to dress, for Mrs. Eastwood objected to the private walk and talk with Innocent, which seemed to her to be done in defiance of her warning and request.