d slapping his thigh in his mirth. "'Tis
no lad. Didst take it for one? Lord! 'tis Jeoff Wildair's youngest
wench. 'Tis Clo--'tis Clo, man. All the county knows the vixen!"

And at that very instant the hounds sprang forth, giving tongue, and
the field sprang forward with them, and all was wild excitement: cries
of "Tally ho!" ringing, horses plunging, red coats seeming to fly
through the air; and my lord Marquess went with the field, his cheek
hot, his heart suddenly thumping in his breast with a sense of he knew
not what, as his eye, following a slender, scarlet-coated figure, saw
it lift its horse for a huge leap over a five-barred gate, take it like
a bird, and lead the whole scurrying, galloping multitude.

"Yes," said my Lord Dunstanwolde, as they rode homeward slowly in the
evening gray, "'tis the girl infant who was found struggling and
shrieking beneath the dead body of her mother, and till to-day I never
saw her. Good Heavens! the beauty of the creature--the childish
deviltry and fire!"

Each turned and looked into the eyes of the other with a question in
his thought, and each man's was the same, though one had lived beyond
sixty years and one but twenty-four. A female creature of such beauty,
of such temper, bred in such manner, among such companions, by such
parents--what fate could be before her? Roxholm averted his eyes.

"Tossed to the wolves," he said; "tossed to the pack--to harry and to
slaver over! God's mercy!"

As they rode he heard the story, Lord Twemlow having related such
incidents as he naturally knew to my Lord Dunstanwolde. 'Twas a bitter
history to Twemlow, whose kinsman the late Lady Wildairs had been, and
who was a discreetly sober and God-fearing gentleman, to whom irregular
habits and the reckless squandering of fortune were loathly things. And
this was the substance of the relation, which was so far out of the
common as to be almost monstrous: His disgust at the birth of this
ninth girl infant had so inflamed Sir Jeoffry that he had refused even
to behold it and had left it to its fate as if it had been an ill-made,
blind puppy. But two of her Ladyship's other children had survived
their infancy, and of these two their father knew nothing whatever but
that they had been called Barbara and Anne, that they showed no promise
of beauty, and lived their bare little lives in the Hall's otherwise
deserted west wing, having as their sole companion and instructress a
certain Mistress Marg