me," exclaimed Vixen, with conviction.
"Now, are you coming?"

Who could resist those little soft hands in doeskin? Certainly not
Rorie. He resigned himself to the endurance of his mother's anger in
the future as a price to be paid for the indulgence of his inclination
in the present, gave Vixen his arm, and turned his face towards the
Abbey House.

They walked through shrubberies that would have seemed a pathless
wilderness to a stranger, but every turn in which was familiar to these
two. The ground was undulating, and vast thickets of rhododendron and
azalea rose high above them, or sank in green valleys below their path.
Here and there a group of tall firs towered skyward above the dark
entanglement of shrubs, or a great beech spread its wide limbs over the
hollows; here and there a pool of water reflected the pale moonshine.

The house lay low, sheltered and shut in by those rhododendron
thickets, a long, rambling pile of building, which had been added to,
and altered, and taken away from, and added to again, like that
well-known puzzle in mental arithmetic which used to amuse us in our
childhood. It was all gables, and chimney-stacks, and odd angles, and
ivy-mantled wall, and richly-mullioned windows, or quaint little
diamond-paned lattices, peeping like a watchful eye from under the
shadow of a jutting cornice. The stables had been added in Queen
Elizabeth's time, after the monks had been routed from their snug
quarters, and the Abbey had been bestowed upon one of the Tudor
favourites. These Elizabethan stables formed the four sides of a
quadrangle, stone-paved, with an old marble basin in the centre--a
basin which the Vicar pronounced to be an early Saxon font, but which
Squire Tempest refused to have removed from the place it had occupied
ever since the stables were built. There were curious carvings upon the
six sides, but so covered with mosses and lichens that nobody could
tell what they meant; and the Squire forbade any scraping process by
officious antiquarians, which might lead to somebody's forcible
appropriation of the ancient basin.

The Squire was not so modern in his ideas as to set up his own
gasometer, so the stables were lighted by lanterns, with an oil-lamp
fixed here and there against the wall. Into this dim uncertain light
came Roderick and Vixen, through the deep stone archway which opened
from the shrubbery into the stable-yard, and which was solid enough for
the gate of a fortified town.