Poor Jenny! he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and muttered something to himself, which was not adapted for publication; and then he looked at her in his turn with that anxious but impotent gaze with which so often one mortal attempts to fathom another--to fathom the unfathomable--whether there be nothing or much in those veiled and inscrutable depths of personal identity. She smiled at him softly, and the dreamy light of this smile went over all her face, touching it into visionary life and beauty. Jenny was baffled in his inquiry, in his investigation, in his counsel; he could not make anything of Innocent. With a mixture of kindness and impatience he hurried her back into the house. “It is growing cold, and you have no shawl,” said Jenny. Would poor Innocent never be sensible to any higher solicitude than this? Next day she went away under the care of John Vane. She did not cry or show any emotion; but her eyes were full of fright, and the excitement of terror. She had not even the same unreasoning instinctive confidence to support her which she had felt in Frederick on her former journey. John Vane was very kind to her, and very good, she knew; but he was not Frederick. She sat still as a mouse in her corner of the carriage, and said “Yes” and “No” when he asked her a question, and saw the world whirl round her once again, and the long stretches of country, and strange faces look in. To Innocent it seemed a kind of treadmill, turning round and round. She was not conscious of making any progress; but only of unknown faces that looked at her, of long green lines of fields and hedgerows flying past. When they had got half way through their journey, they discovered that Frederick was in the same train, with his wife, whom he was taking to her father’s house. He came to the carriage, when the train stopped, and leaned his arms upon the window and talked to Innocent, who brightened at the sight of him, and instinctively put out her hand to cling to the most real thing she knew, the first human creature whom she had personally identified and discovered, as it were, out of the unknown. John Vane could not be supposed to understand this altogether inexplainable feeling, which poor Innocent could no more have put into words than she could have written a poem. He thought very differently of it. He thought like a man that the other man, smiling and talking lightly to the poor girl, had meanly accepted the worthless flower of this child’s love to laugh at, or tread under foot. He was unjust, for perhaps the most really good feeling in Frederick’s mind (when she did not cross or irritate him) was his tenderness for his little cousin; but the other cousin, who felt himself her protector, realized this as little as he understood the nature of Innocent’s sentiments. He made the poor child change her seat to the other end of the carriage, and when Frederick came back, entertained him