Rorie remembered that plaid poplin dress when he was at Eton. It was a
royal Stuart, too brilliant to be forgotten. He used to wonder whether
it would ever wear out, or whether it was not made of some
indestructible tissue, like asbestos--a fabric that neither time nor
fire could destroy.

"It was Rorie's last night, you see, mamma," apologised Vixen, "and I
knew you and papa would like him to come, and that you wouldn't mind
his shooting-clothes a bit, though they do make him look like the
under-keeper, except that the under-keeper's better looking than Rorie,
and has finished growing his whiskers, instead of living in the
expectation of them."

And with this Parthian shot, Vixen made a pirouette on her neat little
morocco-shod toes, and whisked herself out of the room; leaving
Roderick Vawdrey to make the best of his existence for the next twenty
minutes with the two women he always found it most difficult to get on
with, Mrs. Tempest and Miss McCroke.

The logs broke into a crackling blaze just at this moment, and lighted
up that luxurious hearth and the two figures beside it.

It was the prettiest thing imaginable in the way of a drawing-room,
that spacious low-ceiled chamber in the Abbey House.

The oak panelling was painted white, a barbarity on the part of those
modern Goths the West End decorators, but a charming background for
quaint Venetian mirrors, hanging shelves of curious old china, dainty
little groups of richly-bound duodecimos, brackets, bronzes, freshest
flowers in majolica jars; water-colour sketches by Hunt, Prout,
Cattermole, and Edward Duncan; sage-green silk curtains; black and gold
furniture, and all the latest prettinesses of the new Jacobean school.
The mixture of real medievalism and modern quaintness was delightful.
One hardly knew where the rococo began or the mediaeval left off. The
good old square fireplace, with its projecting canopy, and columns in
white and coloured marbles, was as old as the days of Inigo Jones; but
the painted tiles, with their designs from the Iliad and Odyssey after
Dante Rossetti, were the newest thing from Minton's factory.

Even Rorie felt that the room was pretty, though he did above all
things abhor to be trapped in it, as he found himself this October
evening.

"There's a great lot of rubbish in it," he used to say of Mrs.
Tempest's drawing-room, "but it's rather nice altogether."

Mrs. Tempest, at five-and-thirty, still retained the good looks wh