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The ruddy firelight was shining across the wide doorway. The old hearth looked as cheerful as of old. And there stood the empty chair beside it. That had been Vixen's particular wish. "Let nothing be disturbed, dear mamma," she had said ever so many times, when her mother was writing her orders to the housekeeper. "Beg them to keep everything just as it was in papa's time."
He had not yet interfered with her toilet, for he had yet to learn what that cost. This knowledge came upon him like a thunder-clap one sultry morning in July real thunder impending in the metallic-tinted sky about a month after Vixen's departure.
And in the moment of the vixen's death, just as Master Black-and-Gray so far recovered his breath and his senses as to sit up and take stock of himself; a pony's nose appeared in the gap alongside him and introduced another new experience into this adventurous puppy's life. The pony must have appeared to his gaze very much as an elephant would appear to a child upon first view.
Presently, happening to glance behind along the line of the trail, Vulp caught sight of another fox, a rival for the vixen's affections, crouching in some bracken scarcely a dozen yards away. With a low grunt of rage, he dashed into the fern, but the watchful stranger simply moved aside, and frisked towards the vixen as she still crouched at the edge of the stream.
To make a scene in a fifty-cent café was not worth the effort, Trudy had once proclaimed, but to run the gauntlet of real rough-house emotion in a jewellery store frequented by his clientele would be social suicide. The only thing was to make Beatrice pay a larger commission on the things for her new tea house so that he could pay for this red-haired vixen's ring.
The tall shafts and the thick tufts of huge leaves were not Vixen's idea of beauty. "I like our beeches and oaks in the Forest ever so much better," she exclaimed. "Everything in the Forest is dear," said Rorie. Vixen felt, with a curious choking sensation, that this was a good opening for her to say something polite.
Lee Virginia turned, and was about to greet the woman as an old acquaintance when something bold and vulgar in the complaining vixen's face checked the impulse. The stage-agent called her "Miss McBride," and with exaggerated courtesy explained that travel was heavy, and that he had not known that she was intending to go.
Tempest's carriage horses, sleek even-minded bays, had been at Brighton, and so had Vixen's beautiful thorough-bred, and a handsome brown for the groom; but all the rest had stayed in Hampshire. Not one had been sold, though the stud was a wasteful and useless one for a widow and her daughter. There was Bullfinch, the hunter Squire Tempest had ridden in his last hour of life.
"Since it's that vixen's trade to behave so with men I don't see that she has any right to refuse one more than another. I may as well tell you she took any lovers she could get at Rouen even coachmen! Yes, indeed, madame the coachman at the prefecture! I know it for a fact, for he buys his wine of us.
A few moments after the door was thrown wide open, and in burst three boys, shouting with one voice "Uncle Geoffrey, Uncle Geoffrey, you must come and see which of Vixen's puppies are to be saved!" "Hush, hush, you rogues, hush!" was Uncle Geoffrey's answer; "don't you know that you are come into civilized society? Aunt Mary never saw such wild men of the woods."
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