o sign of Captain Winstanley.

"I'm afraid I'm rather late," Vixen said apologetically.

She felt a kind of half-pitying respect for Miss Skipwith, as a
harmless lunatic.

"My dear, I daresay that as an absolute fact you are late," answered
the lady of the manor, without looking up from her book, "but as time
is never too long for me, I have been hardly conscious of the delay.
Your stepfather has gone down to the club at St. Helier's to see some
of his old acquaintances. Perhaps you would like a cup of tea?"

Vixen replied that she would very much like some tea, whereupon Miss
Skipwith poured out a weak and tepid infusion, against which the girl
inwardly protested.

"If I am to exist at Les Tourelles, I must at least have decent tea,"
she said to herself. "I must buy an occasional pound for my own
consumption, make friends with Mrs. Doddery, and get her to brew it for
me."

And then Vixen knelt down by the arm-chair and tried to get upon
intimate terms with the Persian. He was a serious-minded animal, and
seemed inclined to resent her advances, so she left him in peace on his
patchwork cushion, a relic of those earlier days when Miss Skipwith had
squandered her precious hours on the feminine inanity of needle-work.

Vixen thought of the German _Volkslied_, as she looked at the old lady
in the black cap, bending over a ponderous volume, with the
solemn-visaged cat coiled on the chair beside her.

"Minerva's Vogel war ein Kauz."

The Persian cat seemed as much an attribute of the female theologian as
the bird of the goddess.

Vixen went to her room soon after dark, and thus avoided the Captain,
who did not return till ten. She was worn out with the fatigue of the
voyage, her long ramble, the painful thoughts and manifold agitations
of the last two days. She set her candle on the dressing-table, and
looked round the bare empty room, feeling as if she were in a dream. It
was all strange, and unhomely, and comfortless; like one of those wild
dream-pictures which seem so appallingly real in their hideous
unreality.

"And I am to live here indefinitely--for the next six years, perhaps,
until I come of age and am my own mistress. It is too dreadful!"

She went to bed and slept a deep and comforting sleep, for very
weariness: and she dreamt that she was walking on the battlements of
Mount Orgueil, in the drowsy afternoon sunlight, with Charles Stuart;
and the face of the royal exile was the face of Roderick Va