ay for ever from the fair glad world; he who had been so
bright and cheerful, whose presence had carried gladness everywhere.

"Is the funeral quite over?" she asked presently, without lifting her
heavy eyelids.

"Yes, dear. It was a noble funeral. Everybody was there--rich and poor.
Everybody loved him."

"The poor most of all," she said. "I know how good he was to them."

Somebody knocked at the door and asked something of Miss McCroke, which
obliged the governess to leave her pupil. Roderick was glad at her
departure, That substantial figure in its new black dress had been a
hinderance to freedom of conversation.

Miss McCroke's absence did not loosen Violet's tongue. She sat looking
at the ground, and was dumb. That silent grief was very awful to
Roderick.

"Violet, why don't you talk to me about your sorrow?" he said. "Surely
you can trust me--your friend--your brother!"

That last word stung her into speech. The hazel eyes shot a swift angry
glance at him.

"You have no right to call yourself that," she said, "you have not
treated me like a sister."

"How not, dear?"

"You should have told me about your engagement--that you were going to
marry Lady Mabel Ashbourne."

"Should I?" exclaimed Rorie, amazed. "If I had I should have told you
an arrant falsehood. I am not engaged to my cousin Mabel. I am not
going to marry her."

"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least whether you are or not," returned
Vixen, with a weary air. "Papa is dead, and trifles like that can't
affect me now. But I felt it unkind of you at the time I heard it."

"And where and how did you hear this wonderful news, Vixen?" asked
Rorie, very pleased to get her thoughts away from her grief, were it
only for a minute.

"Mamma told me that everybody said you were engaged, and that the fact
was quite obvious."

"What everybody says, and I what is quite obvious, is very seldom true,
Violet. You may take that for a first principle in social science. I am
not engaged to anyone. I have no thought of getting married--for the
next three years."

Vixen received this information with chilling silence. She would have
been very glad to hear it, perhaps, a week ago--at which time she had
found it a sore thing to think of her old playfellow as Lady Mabel's
affianced husband--but it mattered nothing now. The larger grief had
swallowed up all smaller grievances. Roderick Vawdrey had receded into
remote distance. He was no one, nothing, in a world t