d as well as you? It is not
dutiful conduct, Violet. I shall really have to engage a companion if
you go on so. Miss McCroke was dreary, but she was not altogether
uncompanionable. One could talk to her."

"You had better have a companion, mamma. Someone who will be lively,
and talk pleasantly about nothing particular all day long. No doubt a
well-trained companion can do that. She has an inexhaustible
well-spring of twaddle in her own mind. I feel as if I could never be
cheerful again."

"We had better have stopped at Brighton----"

"I hate Brighton!"

"Where we knew so many nice people----"

"I detest nice people!"

"Violet, do you know that you have an abominable temper?"

"I know that I am made up of wickedness!" answered Vixen vehemently.

She left the room without another word, and went straight to her den
upstairs, not to throw herself on the ground, and abandon herself to a
childish unreasoning grief, as she had done on the night of Roderick's
coming of age, but to face the situation boldly. She walked up and down
the dim fire-lit room, thinking of what she had just heard.

"What does it matter to me? Why should I be so angry?" she asked
herself. "We were never more than friends and playfellows. And I think
that, on the whole, I rather disliked him. I know I was seldom civil to
him. He was papa's favourite. I should hardly have tolerated bun but
for that."

She felt relieved at having settled this point in her mind. Yet there
was a dull blank sense of loss, a vague aching in her troubled heart,
which she could not get rid of easily. She walked to and fro, to and
fro, while the fire faded out and the pale windows darkened.

"I hate myself for being so vexed about this," she said, clasping her
hands above her head with a vehemence that showed the intensity of her
vexation. "Could I--I--Violet Tempest--ever be so despicable a creature
as to care for a man who does not care for me; to be angry, sorry,
broken-hearted, because a man does not want me for his wife? Such a
thing is not possible; if it were, I think I would kill myself. I
should be ashamed to live. I could not look human beings in the face. I
should take poison, or turn Roman Catholic and go into a convent, where
I should never see the face of a man again. No; I am not such an odious
creature. I have no regard for Rorie except as my old playfellow, and
when he comes home I will walk straight up to him and give him my hand,
and congratulate h