if I fall ill. No one will care. If I were to die,
no one would be sorry. I have no place in the world. No one would miss
me."

"My dear, it is absolutely wicked to talk in this strain; just as you
are developing new powers, an intellect which may make you a pillar and
a landmark in your age."

"I don't want to be a pillar or a landmark," said Vixen impatiently. "I
don't want to have my name associated with 'movements,' or to write
letters to The Times. I should like to have been happy my own way."

She turned her back upon Miss Skipwith, and lay so still that the
excellent lady supposed she was dropping off to sleep.

"A good night's rest will restore her, and she will awake with renewed
appetite for knowledge," she murmured benevolently as she went back to
her Swedenborgian studies.

CHAPTER IX.

The nearest Way to Norway.

No such blessing as a good night's rest was in store for Violet Tempest
on that night of the first of August. She lay in a state of
half-consciousness that was near akin to delirium. When she closed her
eyes for a little while the demon of evil dreams took hold of her. She
was in the old familiar home-scenes with her dear dead father. She
acted over again that awful tragedy of sudden death. She was upbraiding
her mother about Captain Winstanley. Bitter words were on her lips;
words more bitter than even she had ever spoken in all her intensity of
adverse feeling. She was in the woody hollow by Rufus's stone,
blindfold, with arms stretched helplessly out, seeking for Rorie among
the smooth beech-boles, with a dreadful sense of loneliness, and a fear
that he was far away, and that she would perish, lost and alone, in
that dismal wood.

So the slow night wore on to morning. Sometimes she lay staring idly at
the stars, shining so serenely in that calm summer sky. She wondered
what life was like, yonder, in those remote worlds. Was humanity's
portion as sad, fate as adverse, there as here? Then she thought of
Egypt, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra--that story of a wild,
undisciplined love, grand in its lawless passion--its awful doom. To
have loved thus, and died thus, seemed a higher destiny than to do
right, and patiently conquer sorrow, and live on somehow to the dismal
end of the dull blameless chapter.

At last, with what laggard steps, with what oppressive tardiness, came
the dawn, in long streaks of lurid light above the edge of the distant
waters.

"'Red sky at morning i