ority.

The winter was over; there were primroses peeping out of the moss and
brambles, and a shy little dog-violet shining like a blue eye here and
there. The flaunting daffodils were yellow in every glade, and the
gummy chestnut buds were beginning to swell. It was mid-March, and as
yet there had been no announcement of home-coming from Roderick Vawdrey
or the Dovedales. The Duke was said to have taken a fancy to the Roman
style of fox-hunting; Lady Mabel was studying art; the Duchess was
suspected of a leaning to Romanism; and Roderick was dancing attendance
upon the family generally.

"Why should he not stay there with them?" said Mr. Scobel, sipping his
pekoe in a comfortable little circle of gossipers round Mrs. Tempest's
gipsy table. "He has very little else to do with his life. He is a
young man utterly without views or purpose. He is one of our many
Gallios. You could not rouse him to an interest in those stirring
questions that are agitating the Catholic Church to her very
foundation. He has no mission. I have sounded him, and found him full
of a shallow good-nature. He would build a church if people asked him,
and hardly know, when it was finished, whether he meant it for Jews or
Gentiles."

Vixen sat in her corner and said nothing. It amused her--rather with a
half-bitter sense of amusement--to hear them talk about Roderick. He
had quite gone out of her life. It interested her to know what people
thought of him in his new world.

"If the Duke doesn't bring them all home very soon the Duchess will go
over to Rome," said Mrs. Scobel, with conviction. "She has been
drifting that way for ever so long. Ignatius isn't high enough for her."

The Reverend Ignatius sighed. He hardly saw his way to ascending any
higher. He had already, acting always in perfect good faith and
conscientious desire for the right, made his pretty little church
obnoxious to many of the simple old Foresters, to whom a pair of brazen
candlesticks on an altar were among the abominations of Baal, and a
crucifix as hateful as the image of Ashtaroth; obstinate old people of
limited vision, who wanted Mr. Scobel to stick to what they called the
old ways, and read the Liturgy as they had heard it when they were
children. In the minds of these people, Mr. Scobel's self-devotion and
hard service were as nothing, while he cut off the ten commandments
from the Sunday morning service, and lighted his altar candles at the
early celebration.

It