jolly in the moonlight. Bates can drive
your pony back, Violet."

Vixen hesitated.

"It's not more than four miles through the plantations," said Roderick.

"Do you think I am afraid of a long walk?"

"Of course not. You were a modern Atalanta three years ago. I don't
suppose a winter in Paris and a season at Brighton have quite spoiled
you."

"It shall be as you like, Mrs. Scobel," said Vixen, appealing to the
Vicar's wife.

"Oh, let us walk by all means," replied Mrs. Scobel, divining her
husband's feelings with respect to Titmouse.

"Then, you may drive the pony home, Bates," said Violet; "and be sure
you give him a good supper."

Titmouse went rattling down the hill at a pace that almost justified
the Vicar's objection to him. He gave a desperate shy in the hollow at
sight of a shaggy donkey, with a swollen appearance about the head,
suggestive, to the equine mind, of hobgoblins. Convulsed at this
appalling spectre. Titmouse stood on end for a second or two, and then
tore violently off, swinging his carriage behind him, so that the
groom's figure swayed to and fro in the moonlight.

"Thank God we're not sitting behind that brute!" ejaculated the Vicar
devoutly.

The pedestrians went off in the other direction, along the brow of the
hill, by a long white road that crossed a wide sweep of heathy country,
brown ridges and dark hollows, distant groups of firs standing black
against the moonlit sky, here and there a solitary yew that looked as
if it were haunted--just such a landscape as that Scottish heath upon
which Macbeth met the three weird women at set of sun, when the battle
was lost and won. Vixen and Rorie led the way; the procession of
school-children followed, singing hymns as they went with a vocal power
that gave no token of diminution.

"Their singing is very melodious when the sharp edge is taken off by
distance," said Rorie; and he and Violet walked at a pace which soon
left the children a good way behind them.

Mellowed by a quarter of a mile or so of interesting space, the music
lent a charm to the tranquil, perfumed night.

By-and-by they came to the gate of an enclosure which covered a large
extent of ground, and through which there was a near way to Beechdale
and the Abbey House. They walked along a grassy track through a
plantation of young pines--a track which led them down into a green and
mossy bottom, where the trees were old and beautiful, and the shadows
fell darker. The tall