before their time
with manifold anxieties. She had a friendly word for everyone, and
gifts for all. Home was sweet to her after her two years' absence,
despite the cloud of sadness that overhung all things. She went out to
the stables and made friends with the old horses, which had been out at
grass all through the summer, and had enjoyed a paradise of rest for
the last two years. Slug and Crawler, Mrs. Tempest's carriage horses,
sleek even-minded bays, had been at Brighton, and so had Vixen's
beautiful thorough-bred, and a handsome brown for the groom; but all
the rest had stayed in Hampshire. Not one had been sold, though the
stud was a wasteful and useless one for a widow and her daughter. There
was Bullfinch, the hunter Squire Tempest had ridden in his last hour of
life. Violet went into his box, and caressed him, and fed him, and
cried over him with bitterest tears. This home-coming brought back the
old sorrow with overwhelming force. She ran out of the stables to hide
her tears, and ran up to her own room, and abandoned herself to her
grief, almost as utterly as she had done on those dark days when her
father's corpse was lying in the house.

There was no friendly Miss McCroke now to be fussy and anxious, and to
interpose herself between Violet Tempest and her grief. Violet was
supposed to be "finished," or, in other words, to know everything under
the sun which a young lady of good birth and ample fortune can be
required to know. Everything, in this case, consisted of a smattering
of French, Italian, and German, a dubious recollection of the main
facts in modern history, hazy images of Sennacherib, Helen of Troy,
Semiramis, Cyrus, the Battle of Marathon, Romulus and Remus, the murder
of Jules Caesar, and the loves of Antony and Cleopatra flitting dimly
athwart the cloudy background of an unmapped ancient world, a few vague
notions about astronomy, some foggy ideas upon the constitution of
plants and flowers, sea-weeds and shells, rocks and hills--and a
general indifference for all literature except poetry and novels.

Miss McCroke, having done her duty conscientiously after her lights,
had now gone to finish three other young ladies, the motherless
daughters of an Anglo-Indian colonel, over whom she was to exercise
maternal authority and guidance, in a tall narrow house in Maida Vale.
She had left Mrs. Tempest with all honours, and Violet had lavished
gifts upon her at parting, feeling fonder of her governess i