“I am the only one she knows,” he said, turning to the others, half pleased, half ashamed; perhaps more than half ashamed, the young man being English, and in deadly terror of being laughed at. “I hope I am old enough to sit up to dinner,” he said, carrying off a little confusion in a laugh; “but I confess after all this travelling I am tired too.” “Let me look at you, Frederick,” said Mrs. Eastwood. “I see you are better; you are not so pale as when you went away. Your illness, on the whole, must have agreed with you. Why didn’t you write, you unkind boy? Nelly and I would have gone over to nurse you----” Heaven forbid! Frederick said to himself; the bare suggestion gave him a livelier idea of the dangers he had escaped than anything else had done. “No, no,” he said, “a journey at this time of the year is no joke. That was the very reason I did not write; and then, of course, I was anxious to get on as quickly as I could to poor Innocent, who was being made a victim of by all the ladies, the doctress and the clergywoman, and all the rest----” “Was she made a victim of?” said Nelly, looking at the new comer in her easy-chair, with doubtful wonder. Innocent divined rather than understood that they were talking of her, and once more raised her eyes to Frederick with a soft smile which seemed to consent to everything he said. She seemed to the ladies to be giving confirmation to his words, whereas, in reality, it was but like the holding out of her hand--another way of showing her confidence and dependence on him. “I took her out of their hands,” said Frederick, with a delightful indifference to facts; “they would have sent her to you with a Pisan outfit, peasant costume for anything I can tell. I was very glad to get there in time. I found the poor child living in the house all alone, not even with a maid, and a dark ghostly dismal sort of house, which you would have thought would have frightened her to death.” “Poor child!” said Mrs. Eastwood, “alone without even a maid? Oh, that is dreadful! Were you frightened, my poor darling?” “No,” said Innocent, glancing at her questioner quickly, and then returning to her habitual gaze upon Frederick. This was not encouraging, but of course Frederick had been her first acquaintance, and she had come to know him. His mother dismissed him summarily to wash his hands before dinner. “Don’t think of dressing,” she said; and Innocent was left alone with them. She sat quite passive, as she had done with Mrs. Drainham, turning her eyes from one to the other with a wistful sort of fear, which half amused, half angered them. To be sure, in her fatigued state, there was every excuse to be made.