sea. Here there was an exodus of
passengers, and of luggage, and an invasion of natives with baskets of
fruit. Vixen bought some grapes and peaches of a female native in a
cap, whose patois was the funniest perversion of French and English
imaginable. And then a bell rang clamorously, and there was a general
stampede, and the gangway was pulled up and the vessel was steaming
gaily towards Jersey; while Vixen sat eating grapes and looking
dreamily skyward, and wondering whether her mother was sleeping
peacefully under the dear old Abbey House roof, undisturbed by any pang
of remorse for having parted with an only child so lightly.

An hour or so and Jersey was in sight, all rocky peaks and
promontories. Anon the steamer swept round a sudden curve, and lo,
Vixen beheld a bristling range of fortifications, a rather untidy
harbour, and the usual accompaniments of a landing-place, the midsummer
sun shining vividly upon the all pervading whiteness.

"Is this the bay that some people have compared to Naples?" Violet
asked her conductor, with a contemptuous curl of her mobile lip, as she
and Captain Winstanley took their seats in a roomy old fly, upon which
the luggage was being piled in the usual mountainous and
insecure-looking style.

"You have not seen it yet from the Neapolitan point of view," said the
Captain. "This quay is not the prettiest bit of Jersey."

"I am glad of that, very glad," answered Vixen acidly; "for if it were,
the Jersey notion of the beautiful would be my idea of ugliness. Oh
what an utterly too horrid street!" she cried, as the fly drove through
the squalid approach to the town, past dirty gutter-bred children, and
women with babies, who looked to the last degree Irish, and the dead
high wall of the fortifications. "Does your aunt live hereabouts, _par
exemple_, Captain Winstanley?"

"My aunt lives six good miles from here, Miss Tempest, in one of the
loveliest spots in the island, amidst scenery that is almost as fine as
the Pyrenees."

"I have heard people say that of anything respectable in the shape of a
hill," answered Vixen, with a dubious air.

She was in a humour to take objection to everything, and had a flippant
air curiously at variance with the dull aching of her heart. She was
determined to take the situation lightly. Not for worlds would she have
let Captain Winstanley see her wounds, or guess how deep they were. She
set her face steadily towards the hills in which her place of