exile was
hidden, and bore herself bravely. Conrad Winstanley gave her many a
furtive glance as he sat opposite her in the fly, while they drove
slowly up the steep green country lanes, leaving the white town in the
valley below them.

"The place is not so bad, after all," said Vixen, looking back at the
conglomeration of white walls and slate roofs, of docks and shipping,
and barracks, on the edge of a world of blue water, "not nearly so
odious as it looked when we landed. But it is a little disappointing at
best, like all places that people praise ridiculously. I had pictured
Jersey as a tropical island, with cactuses and Cape jasmine growing in
the hedges, orchards of peaches and apricots, and melons running wild."

"To my mind the island is a pocket edition of Devonshire with a dash of
Brittany," answered the Captain. "There's a fig-tree for you!" he
cried, pointing to a great spreading mass of five-fingered leaves
lolloping over a pink plastered garden-wall--an old untidy tree that
had swallowed up the whole extent of a cottager's garden. "You don't
see anything like that in the Forest."

"No," answered Vixen, tightening her lips; "we have only oaks and
beeches that have been growing since the Heptarchy."

And now they entered a long lane, where the interlaced tree-tops made
an arcade of foliage--a lane whose beauty even Vixen could not gainsay.
Ah, there were the Hampshire ferns on the steep green banks! She gave a
little choking sob at sight of them, as if they had been living things.
Hart's-tongue, and lady-fern, and the whole family of osmundas. Yes;
they were all there. It was like home--with a difference.

Here and there they passed a modern villa, in its park-like grounds,
and the Captain, who evidently wished to be pleasant, tried to expound
to Violet the conditions of Jersey leases, and the difficulties which
attend the purchase of land or tenements in that feudal settlement. But
Vixen did not even endeavour to understand him. She listened with an
air of polite vacancy which was not encouraging.

They passed various humbler homesteads, painted a lively pink, or a
refreshing lavender, with gardens where the fuchsias were trees covered
with crimson bloom, and where gigantic hydrangeas bloomed in palest
pink and brightest azure in wildest abundance. Here Vixen beheld for
the first time those preposterous cabbages from whose hyper-natural
growth the islanders seem to derive a loftier pride than from any