h enthusiasm. One might have fancied it a fertile corner of
Devonshire that had slipped its moorings and drifted westward on a
summer sea.

"If I had Arion here, and--Rorie, I think I could be almost happy,"
Vixen said to herself with a dreamy smile.

"And Rorie!"

Alas, poor child! faintly, feebly steadfast in the barren path of
honour: where could she not have been happy with the companion of her
childhood, the one only love of her youth? Was there ever a spot of
land or sea, from Hudson's Bay to the unmapped archipelago or
hypothetical continent of the Southern Pole, where she could not have
been happy with Roderick Vawdrey? She thought again of Helen Rolleston
and her lover on the South Sea island. Ah what a happy fate was that of
the consumptive heroine! Alone, protected, cherished, and saved from
death by her devoted lover.

Poor Rorie! She knew how well she loved him, now that the wide sea
rolled between them, now that she had said him nay, denied her love,
and parted from him for ever.

She thought of that scene in the pine-wood, dimly lit by the young
moon. She lived again those marvellous moments--the concentrated bliss
and pain of a lifetime. She felt again the strong grasp of his hands,
his breath upon her cheek, as he bent over her shoulder. Again she
heard him pleading for the life-long union her soul desired as the most
exquisite happiness life could give.

"I had not loved thee, dear, so well
Loved I not honour more."

Those two familiar lines flashed into her mind as she thought of her
lover. To have degraded herself, to have dishonoured him; no, it would
have been too dreadful. Were he to plead again she must answer again as
she had answered before.

"His mother despised me," she thought. "If people in a better world are
really _au courant_ as to the affairs of this, I should like Lady Jane
Vawdrey to know that I am not utterly without the instincts of a
gentlewoman."

She wandered on, following the winding of the lanes, careless where she
went, and determined to take advantage of her liberty. She met few
people, and of those she did not trouble herself to ask her way.

"If I lose myself on my desert island it can't much matter," she
thought. "There is no one to be anxious about me. Miss Skipwith will be
deep in her universal creed, and Captain Winstanley would be very glad
for me to be lost. My death would leave him master for life of the
Abbey House and all belonging to it."