th a girl who had been so besotted as to refuse a wealthy
young nobleman. So Vixen went her own way, and nobody cared. She seemed
to have a passion for solitude, and avoided even her old friends, the
Scobels, who had made themselves odious by their championship of Lord
Mallow.

The London season was at its height when the Winstanleys went back to
Hampshire. The Dovedales were to be at Kensington till the beginning of
July, with Mr. Vawdrey in attendance upon them. He had rooms in Ebury
Street, and had assumed an urban air which in Vixen's opinion made him
execrable.

"I can't tell you how hateful you look in lavender gloves and a high
hat," she said to him one day in Clarges Street.

"I daresay I look more natural dressed like a gamekeeper," he answered
lightly; "I was born so. As for the high hat, you can't hate it more
than I do; and I have always considered gloves a foolishness on a level
with pigtails and hair-powder."

Vixen had been wandering in her old haunts for something less than a
fortnight, when, on one especially fine morning, she mounted Arion
directly after breakfast and started on one of her rambles, with the
faithful Bates in attendance, to open gates or to pull her out of bogs
if needful. Upon this point Mrs. Winstanley was strict. Violet might
ride when and where she pleased--since these meanderings in the Forest
were so great a pleasure to her--but she must never ride without a
groom.

Old Bates liked the duty. He adored his mistress, and had spent the
greater part of his life in the saddle. There was no more enjoyable
kind of idleness possible for him than to jog along in the sunshine on
one of the Captain's old hunters; called upon for no greater exertion
than to flick an occasional fly off his horse's haunch, or to bend down
and hook open the gate of a plantation with his stout hunting-crop.
Bates had many a brief snatch of slumber in those warm enclosures,
where the air was heavy with the scent of the pines, and the buzzing of
summer flies made a perpetual lullaby. There was a delicious sense of
repose in such a sleep, but it was not quite so pleasant to be jerked
suddenly into the waking world by a savage plunge of the aggravated
hunter's hindlegs, goaded to madness by a lively specimen of the
forest-fly.

On this particular morning Vixen was in a thoughtful mood, and Arion
was lazy. She let him walk at a leisurely pace under the beeches of
Gretnam Wood, and through the quiet paths of th