on of an unknown world--a world in
which it was possible for people to dislike and misjudge her.

This is one of the disadvantages of being reared in a little heaven of
domestic love. The outside world seems so hard, and black, and dreary
afterwards, and the inhabitants thereof passing cruel.

Miss Tempest looked upon Roderick Vawdrey as her own particular
property--a person whom she had the right to order about as she
pleased. Rorie had been her playfellow and companion in his
holiday-time for the last five years. All their tastes were in common.
They had the same love for the brute creation, the same wild delight in
rushing madly through the air on the backs of unreasoning animals;
widely different in their tastes from Lady Mabel, who had once been run
away with in a pony-carriage, and looked upon all horses as incipient
murderers. They had the same love of nature, and the same indifference
to books, and the same careless scorn of all the state and ceremony of
life.

Vixen was "rising fifteen," as her father called it, and Rorie was just
five years her senior. The Squire saw them gay and happy together,
without one serious thought of what might come of their childish
friendship in the growth of years. That his Vixen could ever care for
anyone but her "old dad," was a notion that had not yet found its way
into the Squire's brain. She seemed to him quite as much his own
property, his own to do what he liked with, singly and simply attached
to him, as his favourite horse or his favourite dog. So there were no
shadowings forth in the paternal mind as to any growth and development
which the mutual affection of these two young people might take in the
future.

It was very different with Lady Jane Vawdrey, who never saw her son and
his cousin Mabel together without telling herself how exactly they were
suited to each other, and what a nice thing it would be for the
Briarwood and Ashbourne estates to be united by their marriage.

Rorie went back to college, and contrived to struggle through his next
examinations with an avoidance of actual discredit; but when Christmas
came he did not return to the Forest, though Violet had counted on his
coming, and had thought that it would be good fun to have his help in
the decorations for the little Gothic church in the valley--a pretty
little new church, like a toy, which the Squire had built and paid for,
and endowed with a perpetual seventy pounds a year out of his own
pocket. I