family name; and, behold! Providence had given him a
daughter.

"The deuce is in it," ejaculated the Squire; "to think that it should
be a vixen!"

This is how Violet Tempest came by her curious pet name. Before she was
short-coated, she had contrived to exhibit a very spirited, and even
vixenish temper, and the family doctor, who loved a small joke, used to
ask after Miss Vixen when he paid his professional visits. As she grew
older, her tawny hair was not unlike a red fox's brush in its bright
golden-brown hue, and her temper proved decidedly vixenish.

"I wish you wouldn't call Violet by that dreadful nickname, dear," Mrs.
Tempest remonstrated mildly.

"My darling, it suits her to a nicety," replied the Squire, and he took
his own way in this as in most things.

The earth rolled round, and the revolving years brought no second baby
to the Abbey House. Every year made the Squire fonder of his little
golden-haired girl. He put her on a soft white ball of a pony as soon
as she could sit up straight, and took her about the Forest with a
leading-rein. No one else was allowed to teach Vixen to ride. Young as
she was, she soon learnt to do without the leading-rein, and the gentle
white pony was discarded as too quiet for little Miss Tempest. Before
her eleventh birthday she rode to hounds, rose before the sun to hunt
the young fox-cubs in early autumn, and saw the stag at bay on the wild
heathery downs above the wooded valleys that sink and fall below
Boldrewood with almost Alpine grandeur. She was a creature full of
life, and courage, and generous impulses, and spontaneous leanings to
all good thoughts; but she was a spoiled child, liked her own way, and
had no idea of being guided by anybody else's will--unless it had been
her father's, and he never thwarted her.

Him she adored with the fondest love that child ever gave to parent: a
blind worshipping love, that saw in him the perfection of manhood, the
beginning and end of earthly good. If anyone had dared to say in
Vixen's hearing that her father could, by any possible combination of
circumstances, do wrong, act unjustly, or ungenerously, it would have
been better for that man to have come to handy grips with a tiger-cat
than with Violet Tempest. Her reverence for her father, and her belief
in him, were boundless.

There never, perhaps, was a happier childhood than Violet's. She was
daughter and heiress to one of the most popular men in that part of the
country