His cousin gave another silvery laugh, clear
as those pearly treble runs upon the Erard; but that pretty artificial
laugh had a ring which betrayed her mortification.

"Rorie is thorough," she said; "when he likes people he thinks them
perfection. You do think that little red-haired girl quite perfection,
now don't you, Rorie?" pursued Lady Mabel, sitting down before the
piano again, and touching the notes silently as she seemed to admire
the slender diamond hoops upon her white fingers--old-fashioned rings
that had belonged to a patrician great-grandmother. "You think her
quite a model young lady, though they say she can hardly read, and
makes her mark--like William the Conqueror--instead of signing her
name, and spends her life in the stables, and occasionally, when the
fox gets back to earth--swears."

"I don't know who they may be," cried Roderick, savagely, "but they say
a pack of lies. Violet Tempest is as well educated as--any girl need
be. All girls can't be paragons; or, if they could, this earth would be
intolerable for the rest of humanity. Lord deliver us from a world
overrun with paragons. Violet Tempest is little more than a child, a
spoiled child, if you like, but she has a heart of gold, and a firmer
seat in her saddle than any other woman in Hampshire."

Roderick had turned from scarlet to pale by the time he finished this
speech. His mother had paled at the first mention of poor Vixen. That
young lady's name acted upon Lady Jane's feelings very much as a red
rag acts on a bull.

"I think, after keeping you away from your mother on the last night of
your vacation, Mr. Tempest might at least have had the good taste to
let you come home sober," said Lady Jane, with suppressed rage.

"I drank a couple of glasses of still hock at dinner, and not a drop of
anything else from the time I entered the Abbey till I left it; and I
don't think, considering how I've seasoned myself with Bass at Oxford,
that two glasses of Rudesheimer would floor me," explained Rorie, with
recovered calmness.

"Oh, but you were drinking deep of a more intoxicating nectar," cried
Lady Mabel, with that provokingly distinct utterance of hers. She had
been taught to speak as carefully as girls of inferior rank are taught
to play Beethoven--every syllable studied, every tone trained and
ripened to the right quality. "You were with Violet Tempest."

"How you children quarrel!" exclaimed the Duchess; "you could hardly be
worse if y