As she spoke she bent forward and on a sudden impulse drew the girl to her and kissed her. Poor lonely Innocent thrilled through all her being to the touch of instinctive tenderness, and her heart beat quickly as she saw the portrait on the harpsichord--her father's pictured face--apparently looking at her with a smile. "Oh, you are very good to me!" she murmured, with a little sob in her breath, as she returned the gentle old lady's kiss. "I feel as if I had known you for years! Did you know him"--and she pointed to the portrait--"very long?" Miss Leigh's eyes grew bright and tender. "Yes!" she answered. "We were boy and girl together--and once--once we were very fond of each other. Perhaps I will tell you the story some day! Now go up to your rooms and arrange everything as you like, and rest a little. Would you like some tea? Anything to eat?" Poor Innocent, who had left Briar Farm at dawn without any thought of food, and had travelled to London almost unconscious of either hunger or fatigue, was beginning to feel the lack of nourishment, and she gratefully accepted the suggestion. "I lunch at two o'clock," continued Miss Leigh. "But it's only a little past twelve now, and if you have come a long way from the country you must be tired. I'll send Rachel up to you with some tea." She went to give the order, and Innocent, left to herself for a moment, moved softly up to her father's picture and gazed upon it with all her soul in her eyes. It was a wonderful face--a face expressive of the highest thought and intelligence--the face of a thinker or a poet, though the finely moulded mouth and chin had nothing of the weakness which sometimes marks a mere dreamer of dreams. Timidly glancing about her to make sure she was not observed, she kissed the portrait, the cold glass which covered it meeting her warm caressing lips with a repelling chill. He was dead--this father whom she could never claim!--dead as Hugo Jocelyn, who had taken that father's place in her life. She might love the ghost of him if her fancy led her that way, as she loved the ghost of the "Sieur Amadis"--but there was nothing else to love! She was alone in the world, with neither father nor "knight of old" to protect or defend her, and on herself alone depended her future. She turned away and left the room, looking a fragile, sad, unobtrusive little creature, with nothing about her to suggest either beauty or power. Yet the mind in that delicate body had a strength of which she was unconscious, and she was already bending it instinctively and intellectually like a bow ready for the first shot--with an arrow which was destined to go straight to its mark.