h she had not derived from human
sympathy.

Miss McCroke went on talking and arguing with Rorie, with a view to
sustaining that fictitious cheerfulness which might beguile Vixen into
brief oblivion of her griefs. But Vixen was not so to be beguiled. She
was with them, but not of them. Her haggard eyes stared at the fire,
and her thoughts were with the dear dead father, over whose
newly-filled grave the evening shadows were closing.

CHAPTER X.

Captain Winstanley.

Two years later, and Vixen was sitting with the same faithful Argus
nestling beside her, by the fireside of a spacious Brighton
drawing-room, a large, lofty, commonplace room, with tall windows
facing seawards. Miss McCroke was there too, standing at one of the
windows taking up a dropped stitch in her knitting, while Mrs. Tempest
walked slowly up and down the expanse of Brussels carpet, stopping now
and then at a window to look idly out at the red sunset beyond the
low-lying roofs and spars of Shoreham. Those two years had changed
Violet Tempest from a slender girl to a nobly-formed woman; a woman
whom a sculptor would have worshipped as his dream of perfection, whom
a painter would have reverenced for her glow and splendour of
colouring; but about whose beauty the common run of mankind, and more
especially womankind, had not quite made up their minds. The pretty
little women with eighteen-inch waists opined that Miss Tempest was too
big.

"She's very handsome, you know, and all that," they said deprecatingly,
"and her figure is quite splendid; but she's on such a very large
scale. She ought to be painted in fresco, you know, on a high cornice.
As Autumn, or Plenty, or Ceres, or something of that kind, carrying a
cornucopia. But in a drawing-room she looks so very massive."

The amber-haired women--palpably indebted to auricomous fluids for the
colour of their tresses--objected to the dark burnished gold of Violet
Tempest's hair. There was too much red in the gold, they said, and a
colour so obviously natural was very unfashionable. That cream-white
skin of hers, too, found objectors, on the score of a slight powdering
of freckles; spots which the kindly sun leaves on the fruit he best
loves. In fact, there were many reservations made by Miss Tempest's
pretended admirers when they summed up her good looks; but when she
rode her pretty bay horse along the King's Road, strangers turned to
look at her admiringly; when she entered a crowded room she