eremony over the better. My engagement
has hung fire rather. There is always a kind of flatness about the
thing between cousins, I daresay. Neither of us is in a hurry. Mabel
has so many ideas and occupations, from orchids to Greek choruses."

"She is very clever," said Vixen.

"She is clever and good, and I am very proud of her," answered Rorie
loyally.

He felt as if he were walking on the brink of a precipice, and that it
needed all his care to steer clear of the edge.

After this there was no more said about Lady Mabel. Vixen and Rorie
rode on happily side by side, as wholly absorbed in each other as
Launcelot and Guinevere--when the knight brought the lady home through
the smiling land, in the glad boyhood of the year, by tinkling rivulet
and shadowy covert, and twisted ivy and spreading chestnut fans--and
with no more thought of Lady Mabel than those two had of King Arthur.

It was the first of many such rides in the fair June weather. Vixen and
Rorie were always meeting in that sweet pathless entanglement of oak
and beech and holly, where the cattle-line of the spreading branches
were just high enough to clear Vixen's coquettish little hat, or in the
long straight fir plantations, where the light was darkened even at
noonday, and where the slumberous stillness was broken only by the hum
of summer flies. It was hardly possible, it seemed to Violet, for two
people to be always riding in the Forest without meeting each other
very often. Various as the paths are they all cross somewhere: and what
more natural than to see Rorie's brown horse trotting calmly along the
grass by the wayside, at the first bend of the road? They made no
appointments, or were not conscious of making any; but they always met.
There was a fatality about it: yet neither Rorie nor Violet ever seemed
surprised at this persistence of fate. They were always glad to see
each other; they had always a world to tell each other. If the earth
had been newly made every day, with a new set of beings to people it,
those two could hardly have had more to say.

"Darned if I can tell what our young Miss and Muster Vawdrey can find
to talk about," said honest old Bates, over his dish of tea in the
servants' hall; "but their tongues ha' never done wagging."

Sometimes Miss Tempest and Mr. Vawdrey went to the kennels together,
and idled away an hour with the hounds; while their horses stood at
ease with their bridles looped round the five-barred gate, the