Then, in a moment, love – that had slumbered long, idly happy in the company of the beloved, and had suddenly awakened to know that this summer-day idlesse meant a passion stronger than death – love got the better of conscience, and he cried vehemently:

"What need I care for the Duke and Duchess! They can have their choice of husbands for their daughter; an heiress like Mabel has only to smile, and a man is at her feet. Why should I sacrifice myself, love, truth, all that makes life worth having? Do you think I would do it for the sake of Ashbourne, and the honour of being a duke's son-in-law?"

"No, Rorie, but for the sake of your promise. And now look, there is Lyndhurst steeple above the woods. I am near home, and we must say good-night."

"Not till you are at your own gate."

"No one must see you. I want to ride in quietly by the stables. Don't think I am ashamed of my errand to-night. I am not; but I want to save my mother trouble, and if Captain Winstanley and I were to discuss the matter there would be a disturbance."

Roderick Vawdrey seized Arion by the bridle.

"I shall not let you go so easily," he said resolutely. "Vixen, I have loved you ever since I can remember you. Will you be my wife?"

"No."

"Why did you say that you loved me?"

"Because I cannot tell a lie. Yes, I love you, Rorie; but I love your honour, and my own, better than the chance of a happiness that might fade and wither before we could grasp it. I know that your mother had a very poor opinion of me while she was alive; I should like her to know, if the dead know anything, that she was mistaken, and that I am not quite unworthy of her respect. You will marry Lady Mabel Ashbourne, Rorie: and ten years hence, when we are sober middle-aged people, we shall be firm friends once again, and you will thank and praise me for having counselled you to cleave to the right. Let go the bridle, Rorie, there's no time to lose. There's a glorious gallop from Queen's Bower to the Christchurch Road."

It was a long grassy ride, safe only for those who knew the country well, for it was bordered on each side by treacherous bogs. Violet knew every inch of the way. Arion scented his stable afar off, and went like the wind; Blue Peter stretched his muscular limbs in pursuit. It was a wild ride along the grassy track, beside watery marshes and reedy pools that gleamed in the dim light of a new moon. The distant woods showed black against the sky. There was no light to mark a human habitation within ken. There was nothing but night and loneliness and the solemn beauty of an unpeopled waste. A forest pony stood here and there – pastern-deep in the sedges – and gazed at those two wild riders, grave and gay, like a ghost. A silvery snake glided across the track; a water-rat plunged, with a heavy splash, into a black pool as the horses galloped by. It was a glorious ride. Miserable as both riders were, they could not but enjoy that wild rush through the sweet soft air, under the silent stars.

Vixen gave a long sigh presently, when they pulled up their horses on the hard road.

"I think I am 'fey' now," she said. "I wonder what is going to happen to me?"

"Whatever misfortunes come to you henceforth will be your own fault," protested Rorie savagely. "You won't be happy, or make me so."

"Don't be angry with me, Rorie," she answered quite meekly. "I would rather be miserable in my own way than happy in yours."

Arion, having galloped for his own pleasure, would now have liked to crawl. He was beginning to feel the effects of unusual toil, and hung his head despondently; but Vixen urged him into a sharp trot, feeling that matters were growing desperate.

Ten minutes later they were at the lodge leading to the stables. The gate was locked, the cottage wrapped in darkness.

"I must go in by the carriage-drive," said Vixen. "It's rather a bore, as I am pretty sure to meet Captain Winstanley. But it can't be helped."

"Let me go in with you."

"No, Rorie; that would do no good. If he insulted me before you, his insolence would pain me."

"And I believe I should pain him," said Rorie. "I should give him the sweetest horsewhipping he ever had in his life."

"That is to say you would bring disgrace upon me, and make my mother miserable. That's a man's idea of kindness. No, Rorie, we part here. Good-night, and – good-bye."

"Fiddlesticks!" cried Rorie. "I shall wait for you all to-morrow morning at the kennels."

Vixen had ridden past the open gate. The lodge-keeper stood at his door waiting for her. Roderick respected her wishes and stayed outside.

"Good-night," she cried again, looking back at him; "Bates shall come to you to-morrow morning."

The hall-door was wide open, and Captain Winstanley stood on the threshold, waiting for his stepdaughter. One of the underlings from the stable was ready to take her horse. She dismounted unaided, flung the reins to the groom, and walked up to the Captain with her firmest step. When she was in the hall he shut the door, and bolted and locked it with a somewhat ostentatious care. She seemed to breathe less freely when that great door had shut out the cool night. She felt as if she were in a jail.

"I should like half-a-dozen words with you in the drawing-room before you go upstairs," Captain Winstanley said stiffly.

"A hundred, if you choose," answered Vixen, with supreme coolness.

She was utterly fearless. What risks or hazards had life that she need dread? She hoped nothing – feared nothing. She had just made the greatest sacrifice that fate could require of her: she had rejected the man she fondly loved. What were the slings and arrows of her stepfather's petty malice compared with such a wrench as that?

She followed Captain Winstanley to the drawing-room. Here there was more air; one long window was open, and the lace curtains were faintly stirred by the night winds. A large moderator lamp burned upon Mrs. Winstanley's favourite table – her books and basket of crewels were there, but the lady of the house had retired.

"My mother has gone to bed, I suppose?" inquired Vixen.

"She has gone to her room, but I fear she is too much agitated to get any rest. I would not allow her to wait here any longer for you."

"Is it so very late?" asked Vixen, with the most innocent air.

Her heart was beating violently, and her temper was not at its best. She stood looking at the Captain, with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes, and her whip tightly clenched.

She was thinking of that speech of Rorie's about the "sweetest horsewhipping." She wondered whether Captain Winstanley had ever been horsewhipped; whether that kind of chastisement was numbered in the sum of his experiences. She opined not. The Captain was too astute a man to bring himself in the way of such punishment. He would do things that deserved horsewhipping, and get off scot free.

"It is a quarter-past eleven. I don't know whether you think that a respectable hour for a young lady's evening ride. May I ask the motive of this nocturnal expedition?"

"Certainly. You deprived Bates of a comfortable place – he has only been in the situation forty years – and I went to get him another. I am happy to say that I succeeded."

"And pray who is the chivalrous employer willing to receive my dismissed servant without a character?"

"A very old friend of my father's – Mr. Vawdrey."

"I thought as much," retorted the Captain. "And it is to Mr. Vawdrey you have been, late at night, unattended?"

"It is your fault that I went unattended. You have taken upon yourself to dismiss my groom – the man who broke my first pony, the man my father gave me for an attendant and protector, just as he gave me my horse. You will take upon yourself to sell my horse next, I suppose?"

"I shall take a great deal more upon myself, before you and I have done with each other, Miss Tempest," answered the Captain, pale with passion.

Never had Vixen seen him so strongly moved. The purple veins stood out darkly upon his pale forehead, his eyes had a haggard look; he was like a man consumed inwardly by some evil passion that was stronger than himself, like a man possessed by devils. Vixen looked at him with wonder. They stood facing each other, with the lamplit table between them, the light shining on both their faces.

"Why do you look at me with that provoking smile?" he asked. "Do you want to exasperate me? You must know that I hate you."

"I do," answered Vixen; "but God only knows why you should do so."

"Do you know no reason?"

"No."

"Can't you guess one?"

"No; unless it is because my father's fortune will belong to me by-and-by, if I live to be five-and-twenty, and your position here will be lessened."

"That is not the reason; no, I am not so base as that. That its not why I hate you, Violet. If you had been some dumpy, homely, country lass, with thick features and a clumsy figure, you and I might have got on decently enough. I would have made you obey me; but I would have been kind to you. But you are something very different. You are the girl I would have perilled my soul to win – the girl who rejected me with careless scorn. Have you forgotten that night in the Pavilion Garden at Brighton? I have not. I never look up at the stars without remembering it; and I can never forgive you while that memory lives in my mind. If you had been my wife, Violet, I would have been your slave. You forced me to make myself your stepfather; and I will be master instead of slave. I will make your life bitter to you if you thwart me. I will put a stop to your running after another woman's sweetheart. I will come between you and your lover, Roderick Vawdrey. Your secret meetings, your clandestine love-making, shall be stopped. Such conduct as you have been carrying on of late is a shame and disgrace to your sex."

"How dare you say that?" cried Vixen, beside herself with anger.

She grasped the lamp with both her hands, as if she would have hurled it at her foe. It was a large moon-shaped globe upon a bronze pedestal – a fearful thing to fling at one's adversary. A great wave of blood surged up into the girl's brain. What she was going to do she knew not; but her whole being was convulsed by the passion of that moment. The room reeled before her eyes, the heavy pedestal swayed in her hands, and then she saw the big moonlike globe roll on to the carpet, and after it, and darting beyond it, a stream of liquid fire that ran, and ran, quicker than thought, towards the open window.

Before she could speak or move, the flame had run up the lace curtain, like a living thing, swift as the flight of a bird or the gliding motion of a lizard. The wide casement was wreathed with light. They two – Vixen and her foe – seemed to be standing in an atmosphere of fire.

Captain Winstanley was confounded by the suddenness of the catastrophe. While he stood dumb, bewildered, Vixen sprang through the narrow space between the flaming curtains, as if she had plunged into a gulf of fire. He heard her strong clear voice calling to the stablemen and gardeners. It rang like a clarion in the still summer night.

There was not a moment lost. The stablemen rushed with pails of water, and directly after them the Scotch gardener with his garden-engine, which held several gallons. His hose did some damage to the drawing-room carpet and upholstery, but the strong jet of water speedily quenched the flames. In ten minutes the window stood blank, and black, and bare, with Vixen standing on the lawn outside, contemplating the damage she had done.

Mrs. Winstanley rushed in at the drawing-room door, ghostlike, in her white peignoir, pale and scared.

"Oh, Conrad, what has happened?" she cried distractedly, just able to distinguish her husband's figure standing in the midst of the disordered room.

"Your beautiful daughter has been trying to set the house on fire," he answered. "That is all."

CHAPTER XVI.
"That must end at once."

A quarter of an hour later, when all the confusion was over, Violet was kneeling by her mother's chair, trying to restore tranquillity to Mrs. Winstanley's fluttered spirits. Mother and daughter were alone together in the elder lady's dressing-room, the disconsolate Pamela sitting, like Niobe, amidst her scattered fineries, her pomade-pots and powder-boxes, fan-cases and jewel-caskets, and all the arsenal of waning beauty.

"Dear mother," pleaded Violet, with unusual gentleness, "pray don't give way to this unnecessary grief. You cannot surely believe that I tried to set this dear old home on fire – that I could be so foolish – granting even that I were wicked enough to do it – as to destroy a place I love – the house in which my father was born! You can't believe such a thing, mother."

"I know that you are making my life miserable," sobbed Mrs. Winstanley, feebly dabbing her forehead with a flimsy Valenciennes bordered handkerchief, steeped in eau-de-cologne, "and I am sure Conrad would not tell a falsehood."

"Perhaps not," said Vixen with a gloomy look. "We will take it for granted that he is perfection and could not do wrong. But in this case he is mistaken. I felt quite capable of killing him, but not of setting fire to this house."

"Oh," wailed Pamela distractedly, "this is too dreadful! To think that I should have a daughter who confesses herself at heart a murderess."

"Unhappily it is true, mother," said Vixen, moodily contrite. "For just that one moment of my life I felt a murderous impulse – and from the impulse to the execution is a very short step. I don't feel myself very superior to the people who are hanged at Newgate, I assure you."

"What is to become of me?" inquired Mrs. Winstanley in abject lamentation. "It is too hard that my own daughter should be a source of misery in my married life, that she should harden her heart against the best of stepfathers, and try, yes, actually try, to bring discord between me and the husband I love. I don't know what I have done that I should be so miserable."

"Dear mother, only be calm and listen to me," urged Violet, who was very calm herself, with a coldly resolute air which presently obtained ascendency over her agitated parent. "If I have been the source of misery, that misery cannot too soon come to an end. I have long felt that I have no place in this house – that I am one too many in our small family. I feel now – yes, mamma, I feel and know that the same roof cannot cover me and Captain Winstanley. He and I can no longer sit at the same board, or live in the same house. That must end at once."

"What complaint can you have to make against him, Violet?" cried her mother hysterically, and with a good deal more dabbing of the perfumed handkerchief upon her fevered brow. "I am sure no father could be kinder than Conrad would be to you if you would only let him. But you have set yourself against him from the very first. It seems as if you grudged me my happiness."

"It shall seem so no longer, mamma. I will cease to be a thorn in your garland of roses," replied Vixen, with exceeding bitterness. "I will leave the Abbey House directly any other home can be found for me. If dear old McCroke would take care of me I should like to go abroad, somewhere very far, to some strange place, where all things would be different and new to me," continued Vixen, unconsciously betraying that aching desire for forgetfulness natural to a wounded heart. "Sweden, or Norway, for instance. I think I should like to spend a year in one of those cold strange lands, with good old McCroke for my companion. There would be nothing to remind me of the Forest," she concluded with a stifled sob.

"My dear Violet, you have such wild ideas," exclaimed her mother with an injured air. "It is just as Conrad says. You have no notion of the proprieties. Sweden or Norway, indeed! Was there ever anything so outlandish? What would people say, I wonder?"

"Ah, what indeed, mamma. Perhaps, they might for once say what is true: that I could not get on with Captain Winstanley, and so was forced to find another home."

"And what a reproach that would be to me," cried her mother. "You are so selfish, Violet; you think of no one but yourself."

"Perhaps that is because nobody else thinks of me, mother."

"How can you say such abominable things, Violet? Am I not thinking of you this moment? I am sure I have thought of you this evening until my head aches. You force one to think about you, when you behave in such a disgraceful manner."

"What have I done that is disgraceful, mamma? I have ridden out at an unusual hour to get a place for an old servant – a man who has served in this house faithfully for forty years. That is what I have done, and I should not be ashamed if it were known to everybody in Hampshire. Yes, even to Lady Mabel Ashbourne, that pattern of chilly propriety. The disgrace is Captain Winstanley's. It is he who ought to be ashamed of turning off my father and grandfather's old servant. What you have to be sorry for, mamma, is that you have married a man capable of such an action."

"How dare you speak against him!" cried the offended wife. "He has done everything for the best. It was your own foolish conduct that obliged him to dismiss Bates. To think that a daughter of mine should have so little self-respect as to go roaming about the Forest with an engaged man! It is too dreadful."

"You need not make yourself unhappy about the engaged man, mamma," said Vixen scornfully. "He is out of danger. Rorie and I need never see each other again. I should be more than content that it should be so. Only arrange with Captain Winstanley for some allowance to be made me – just money enough to enable me to live abroad with dear old McCroke. I want no gaieties, I want no fine dresses, The simplest mode of life, in a strange country, will suit me best."

"I can't bear the idea of your going away," whimpered Mrs. Winstanley. "People will talk so. A stepfather's is such a delicate position. People are sure to say cruel things about Conrad. And it is all your fault, Violet. We might have lived so happily together if you had liked."

"We might, perhaps, mamma; but I don't think any of us knew the way. Captain Winstanley could hardly expect that to sell my father's favourite horse was the shortest way to my liking; and that's how he began his reign in this house. Don't let us talk any more, my dear mother. Words are useless to heal such wounds as ours. Good-night. Sleep well, and forget all about me. To-morrow you and the Captain can give me my liberty."

"I thought you were so fond of the Abbey House," moaned her mother.

"So I was when it was home. It has ceased to be my home, and I shall be glad to leave it."

"Oh, Violet, you have a hard heart."

"Good-night, mamma."

She was gone, leaving Mrs. Winstanley feebly moaning, and vaguely dabbing her forehead, feeling that the Fates had not been kind to her. Life seemed to have gone all askew. It was as if Theodore had taken to sending home misfits. Nothing was smooth or pleasant in an existence whose halcyon calm had once been undisturbed by so much as a crumpled rose-leaf.

Vixen went straight to her room, accompanied by Argus, who had followed her from the hall to the door of her mother's dressing-room, and had waited patiently for her in the corridor, with his head leaning against the closed door, as if he scented trouble within.

When girl and dog were alone together, Violet flung herself on the ground, threw her arms round the mastiff's thick neck, and let her tears flow freely against that faithful head.

"Oh, Argus," she cried piteously, "you are the only friend left me in this wide world!"