llent offer from an Irish
peer."

"I would not have done the Irish peer so great a wrong as to have
married him without loving him."

"I admire your honourable feeling," said Miss Skipwith, with solemn
approval; "I, too, might have married, but the man towards whom my
heart most inclined was a man of no family. I could not marry a man
without family. I am weak enough to be prouder of my pedigree than
other women are of beauty and fortune. I am the last of the Skipwiths,
and I have done nothing to degrade my race. The family name and the
family pride will die with me. There was a time when a Skipwith owned a
third of the island. Our estate has dwindled to the garden and meadows
that surround this old house; our family has shrunk into one old woman;
but if I can make the name of Skipwith famous before I go down to my
grave, I shall not have lived and laboured in vain."

Vixen felt a thrill of pity as she listened to this brief confession of
a self-deluded solitary soul, which had built its house upon sand, as
hopefully as if the foundations were solidest rock. The line of
demarcation between such fanaticism as Miss Skipwith's and the
hallucination of an old lady in Bedlam, who fancies herself Queen
Victoria, seemed to Vixen but a hair's breadth. But, after all, if the
old lady and Miss Skipwith were both happy in their harmless
self-deceptions, why should one pity them? The creature to be pitied is
the man or woman who keenly sees and feels the hard realities of life,
and cannot take pleasure in phantoms.

Vixen ran off to her room to get her hat and gloves, delighted to find
herself free. Miss Skipwith was not such a very bad sort of person,
after all, perhaps. Liberty to roam about the island with her dog Vixen
esteemed a great boon. She would be able to think about her troubles,
unmolested by inquisitive looks or unwelcome sympathy.

She went down to the court-yard, untied the faithful Argus, and they
set out together to explore the unknown, the dog in such wild spirits
that it was almost impossible for Vixen to be sad. The afternoon sun
was shining in all his glory, birds were singing, flickering lights and
shadows playing on the grassy banks. Argus scampered up and down the
lanes, and burst tumultuously through gaps in the hedges, like a dog
possessed of demons.

It was a pretty little island, after all; Vixen was fain to admit as
much. There was some justification for the people who sang its praises
with suc