s.

A pot or a pan had been stuck into every corner that would hold one.
There were desks, and boxes, and wickerwork baskets of every shape and
kind, a dwarf oak bookcase on either side of the fireplace, with the
books all at sixes and sevens, leaning against each other as if they
were intoxicated. The broad mantelpiece presented a confusion of
photographs, cups and saucers, violet jars, and Dresden shepherdesses.
Over the quaint old Venetian glass dangled Vixen's first trophy, the
fox's brush, tied with a scarlet ribbon. There were no birds, or
squirrels, or dormice, for Vixen was too fond of the animal creation to
shut her favourites up in cages; but there was a black bearskin spread
in a corner for Argus to lie upon. In the wide low windows there were
two banks of bright autumn flowers, pompons and dwarf roses, mignonette
and veronica.

Miss McCroke drew up the blind, and stirred the fire.

"I'll go and ask her to come," she said.

"Do, like a dear," said Rorie.

He paced the room while she was gone, full of sadness. He had been very
fond of the Squire, and that awfully sudden death, an apopleptic
seizure, instantaneous as a thunderbolt, had impressed him very
painfully. It was his first experience of the kind, and it was
infinitely terrible to him. It seemed to him a long time before Vixen
appeared, and then the door opened, and a slim black figure came in, a
white fixed face looked at him piteously, with tearless eyes made big
by a great grief. She came leaning on Miss McCroke, as if she could
hardly walk unaided. The face was stranger to him than an altogether
unknown face. It was Violet Tempest with all the vivid joyous life gone
out of her, like a lamp that is extinguished.

He took her cold trembling hands and drew her gently to a chair, and
sat down beside her.

"I wanted so much to see you, dear," he said, "to tell you how sorry we
all are for you--my mother, my aunt, and cousin"--Violet gave a faint
shiver--"all of us. The Duke liked your dear father so much. It was
quite a shock to him."

"You are very good," Violet said mechanically.

She sat by him, pale and still as marble, looking at the ground. His
voice and presence impressed her but faintly, like something a long way
off. She was thinking of her dead father. She saw nothing but that one
awful figure. They had laid him in his grave by this time. The cold
cruel earth had fallen upon him and hidden him for ever from the light;
he was shut aw