o. It would have been less
wicked to give way then, and accept my happy fate, than to suffer these
evil feelings that are gnawing at my heart to-day--vain rage, cruel
hatred of the innocent!"

The wedding bells must be ringing by this time. She fancied she could
hear them. Yes, the summer air seemed alive with bells. North, south,
east, west, all round the island, they were ringing madly, with tuneful
marriage peal. They beat upon her brain. They would drive her mad. She
tried to stop her ears, but then those wedding chimes seemed ringing
inside her head. She could not shut them out. She remembered how the
joybells had haunted her ears on Rorie's twenty-first birthday--that
day which had ended so bitterly, in the announcement of the engagement
between the cousins. Yes, that had been her first real trouble, How
well she remembered her despair and desolation that night, the rage
that possessed her young soul.

"And I was little more than a child, then," she said to herself.
"Surely I must have been born wicked. My dear father was living then;
and even the thought of his love did not comfort me. I felt myself
abandoned and alone in the world. How idiotically fond I must have been
of Rorie. Ever so many years have come and gone, and I have not cured
myself of this folly. What is there in him that I should care for him?"

She got up from the grass, plucked herself out of that paroxysm of
mental pain which came too near lunacy, and began to walk slowly round
the garden-paths, reasoning with herself, calling womanly pride to the
rescue.

"I hate myself for this weakness," she protested dumbly. "I did not
think I was capable of it. When I was a child, and was taken to the
dentist, did I ever whine and howl like vulgar-minded children? No; I
braced myself for the ordeal, and bore the pain, as my father's child
ought."

She walked quickly to the house, burst into the parlour, where Miss
Skipwith was sitting at her desk, the table covered with open volumes,
over which flowers of literature the student roved, beelike, collecting
honey for her intellectual hive.

"Please, Miss Skipwith, will you give me some books about Buddha?" said
Vixen, with an alarming suddenness. "I am quite of your opinion: I
ought to study. I think I shall go in for theology."

"My dearest child!" cried the ancient damsel, enraptured. "Thank
Heaven! the seed I have sown has germinated at last. If you are once
inspired with the desire to enter that v