olet Tempest with an overwhelming anger.

She kept her passion under, so far as to speak very calmly to Bates.
Her face was white with suppressed rage, her great brown eyes shone
with angry fire, her lips quivered as she spoke, and the rings on one
clinched hand were ground into the flesh of the slender fingers.

"Never mind, Bates," she said very gently; "I'll get you a good place
before ten o'clock to-night. Pack up your clothes, and be ready to go
where I tell you two hours hence. But first saddle Arion."

"Bless yer heart, Miss Voylet, you're not going out riding this
evening? Arion's done a long day's work."

"I know that; but he's fresh enough to do as much more--I've just been
looking at him. Saddle him at once, and keep him ready in his stable
till I come for him. Don't argue, Bates. If I knew that I were going to
ride him to death I should ride him to-night all the same. You are
dismissed without a character, are you?" cried Vixen, laughing
bitterly. "Never mind, Bates, I'll give you a character; and I'll get
you a place."

She ran lightly off and was gone, while Bates stood stock still
wondering at her. There never was such a young lady. What was there in
life that he would not have done for her--were it to the shedding of
blood? And to think he was no more to serve and follow her; no longer
to jog contentedly through the pine-scented Forest--watching the
meteoric course of that graceful figure in front of him, the lively
young horse curbed by the light and dexterous hand, the ruddy brown
hair glittering in the sunlight, the flexible form moving in unison
with every motion of the horse that carried it! There could be no
deeper image of desolation in Bates's mind than the idea that this
rider and this horse were to be henceforth severed from his existence.
What had he in life save the familiar things and faces among which he
had grown from youth to age? Separate him from these beloved
surroundings, and he had no standpoint in the universe. The reason of
his being would be gone. Bates was as strictly local in his ideas as
the zoophyte which has clung all its life to one rock.

He went to the harness-room for Miss Tempest's well-worn saddle, and
brought Arion out of his snug box, and wisped him and combed him, and
blacked his shoes, and made him altogether lovely--a process to which
the intelligent animal was inclined to take objection, the hour being
unseemly and unusual. Poor Bates sighed over his task, a