ents, present or future; but you seem to prefer
being left outside."

"Yes," replied Vixen, "I prefer to stand alone."

"Very well then. I repeat my question--though, as you decline to have
any voice in our arrangements, it's hardly worth while to trouble you
about it--what are we to do with this fellow?"

"Do with him? My father's horse!" exclaimed Vixen; "the horse he rode
to his dying day! Why, keep him, of course!"

"Don't you think that is rather foolish? Nobody rides or drives him. It
takes all one man's time to groom him and exercise him. You might just
as well keep a white elephant in the stables."

"He was my father's favourite horse," said Vixen, with indignant tears
clouding the bright hazel of her eyes; "I cannot imagine mamma capable
of parting with him. Yet I ought not to say that, after my experience
of the last few months," she added in an undertone.

"Well, my dear Miss Tempest, family affection is a very charming
sentiment, and I can quite understand that you and your mamma would be
anxious to secure your father's horse a good home and a kind master;
but I cannot comprehend your mamma being so foolish as to keep a horse
which is of no use to any member of her family. If the brute were of a
little lighter build, I wouldn't mind riding him myself, and selling
one of mine. But he's too much of a weight-carrier for me."

Vixen gave Arion a final hug, drying her angry tears upon his soft
neck, and left the stable without another word. She went straight to
her mother's morning-room, where the widow was sitting at a table
covered with handkerchiefs-cases and glove-boxes, deeply absorbed in
the study of their contents, assisted by the faithful Pauline,
otherwise Polly, who had been wearing smarter gowns and caps ever since
her mistress's engagement, and who was getting up a _trousseau_ on her
own account, in order to enter upon her new phase of existence with due
dignity.

"We shall keep more company, I make no doubt, with such a gay young
master as the Captain," she had observed in the confidences of Mrs.
Trimmer's comfortable parlour.

"I can never bring myself to think Swedish gloves pretty," said Mrs.
Tempest, as Vixen burst into the room, "but they are the fashion, and
one must wear them."

"Mamma," cried Vixen, "Captain Winstanley wants you to sell Bullfinch.
If you let him be sold, you will be the meanest of women."

And with this startling address Vixen left the room as suddenly as she
ha