and that there was not a single thing that would fit. I
looked an object in every one of the dresses."

CHAPTER II.

Wedding Garments.

After that night Vixen held her peace. There were no more bitter words
between Mrs. Tempest and her daughter, but the mother knew that there
was a wellspring of bitterness--a Marah whose waters were
inexhaustible--in her daughter's heart; and that domestic happiness,
under one roof, was henceforth impossible for these two.

There were very few words of any kind between Violet and Mrs. Tempest
at this time. The girl kept herself as much a possible apart from her
mother. The widow lived her languid drawing-room life, dawdling away
long slow days that left no more impression behind them than the drift
of rose-leaves across the velvet lawn before her windows. A little
point-lace, deftly worked by slim white fingers flashing with gems; a
little Tennyson; a little Owen Meredith; a little Browning--only half
understood at best; a little scandal; a great deal of orange pekoe,
sipped out of old Worcester teacups of royal blue or flowered Swansea;
an hour's letter-writing on the last fashionable note-paper;
elegantly-worded inanity, delicately penned in a flowing Italian hand,
with long loops to the Y's and G's, and a serpentine curve at the end
of every word.

No life could well have been more useless or vapid. Even Mrs. Tempest's
charities--those doles of wine and soup, bread and clothing, which are
looked for naturally from the mistress of a fine old mansion--were
vicarious. Trimmer, the housekeeper, did everything. Indeed, in the
eyes of the surrounding poor, Mrs. Trimmer was mistress of the Abbey
House. It was to her they looked for relief; it was her reproof they
feared; and to her they louted lowest. The faded beauty, reclining in
her barouche, wrapped in white raiment of softest China crape, and
whirling past them in a cloud of dust, was as remote as a goddess. They
could hardly have realised that she was fashioned out of the same clay
that made themselves.

Upon so smooth and eventless an existence Captain Winstanley's presence
came like a gust of north wind across the sultry languor of an August
noontide. His energy, his prompt, resolute manner of thinking and
acting upon all occasions, impressed Mrs. Tempest with an extraordinary
sense of his strength of mind and manliness. It seemed to her that she
must always be safe where he was. No danger, no difficulty could assail
her