Eastwood’s sense of propriety had long ere now secured a music master for Innocent, and that by this time she could play a little on the piano, not cleverly, but yet with a certain dreamy faculty, amusing herself with long-drawn chords and fragmentary combinations of her own. She could speak French and Italian, and even a little German, thanks to her foreign education, and she had no taste for drawing. What more than this could be done in the way of education for her? She had the same novels to read if she chose which came from Mudie’s periodically for the rest of the family, and she was recommended to “take a book” by everybody who saw her seated, as she was seen so often, with her hands in her lap, doing nothing. But it was only within a very recent time that Innocent had begun to take this advice. She had been laughed at for her ignorance, and the laugh had touched her for the first time; and here she was accordingly, poor child, on this sunny, hazy autumn afternoon, straying up and down, up and down the Lady’s Walk, reading half aloud to herself, about the dead controversies, the national struggles of which she knew nothing. The Queen of Scots even was to her but a printed name. She knew nothing of the story, nothing of the woman for whom partisans still fight, though she has been dead these two hundred years. She read over with her whispering lips the curt record of events which once made blood flow and hearts beat, insensible to them as though they had been mere revolutions of machinery. The leaf which dropped on her book was real, and so were the pebbles which caught her foot as she strayed on, not looking where she went; but the history was a dead thing so far as Innocent was concerned, and she herself was no more real than the history. What did she there, a stray, half-awakened soul, among the facts of that ordinary everyday scene? She was an embodied dream, scarcely realizable even by herself, and her occupation was as unreal as she was, as she strayed like a vision, appearing and re-appearing between the openings of the trees. “Is it really true,” said Molyneux, suddenly departing from the graver subject, “that old Longueville has fallen in love with that child, Innocent? It isn’t forbidden, I believe, to marry your grandfather, but only your grandmother, eh Nelly? Are you jealous? First of all he wanted you----” “He never wanted me.” “Oh, it is very well to say so now; but it was that, you know, that brought me to the point.” “If you did not want to be brought to the point, it is a pity that it should have happened through a mistake,” said Nelly, driven into momentary crossness by the complication and confusion of her feelings. But Molyneux did not want to quarrel. He only laughed lightly. “Perhaps I am the best judge whether it was a mistake,” he said, “but in the meantime he is going in for Innocent. Is it true?” “He has said something to mamma; but not enough to build any story upon, or to be talked about----”