"Robin,--dear Robin!" she said--"Don't make it harder for me than it is! Think for a moment! I am nameless--a poor, unbaptised, deserted creature who was flung on your uncle's charity eighteen years ago--I am a stranger and intruder in this old historic place--I have no right to be here at all--only through your uncle's kindness and yours. And now things have happened so cruelly for me that I am supposed to be to you--what I am not,"--and the deep colour flushed her cheeks and brow. "I have somehow--through no fault of my own--lost my name!--though I had no name to lose--except Innocent!--which, as the clergyman told me, is no name for a woman. Do you not see that if I married you, people would say it was because you were compelled to marry me?--that you had gone too far to escape from me?--that, in fact, we were a sort of copy of Ned Landon and Jenny of the Mill-Dykes?" "Innocent!" He uttered the name in a tone of indignant and despairing protest. They were in the oak parlour together, and she went slowly to the window and let her pet dove fly. "Ah, yes! Innocent!" she repeated, sadly--"But you must let me go, Robin!--just as I have let my dove fly, so you must let me fly also--far, far away!" CHAPTER IX No more impressive scene was ever witnessed in a country village than the funeral of "the last of the Jocelyns,"--impressive in its solemnity, simplicity and lack of needless ceremonial. The coffin, containing all that was mortal of the sturdy, straightforward farmer, whose "old-world" ways of work and upright dealing with his men had for so long been the wonder and envy of the district, was placed in a low waggon and covered with a curiously wrought, handwoven purple cloth embroidered with the arms of the French knight "Amadis de Jocelin," tradition asserting that this cloth had served as a pall for every male Jocelyn since his time. The waggon was drawn by four glossy dark brown cart-horses, each animal having known its master as a friend whose call it was accustomed to obey, following him wherever he went. On the coffin itself was laid a simple wreath of the "Glory" roses gathered from the porch and walls of Briar Farm, and offered, as pencilled faintly on a little scroll--"With a life's love and sorrow from Innocent." A long train of mourners, including labourers, farm-lads, shepherds, cowherds, stable-men and villagers generally, followed the corpse to the grave,--Robin Clifford, as chief mourner and next-of-kin to the dead man, walking behind the waggon with head down-bent and a face on which intense grief had stamped such an impress as to make it look far older than his years warranted. Groups of women stood about, watching the procession with hard eager eyes, and tongues held in check for a while, only to wag more vigorously than ever when the ceremony should be over. Innocent, dressed in deep black for the first time in her life, went by herself to the churchyard, avoiding the crowd--and,