The wedding bells must be ringing by this time. She fancied she could hear them. Yes, the summer air seemed alive with bells. North, south, east, west, all round the island, they were ringing madly, with tuneful marriage peal. They beat upon her brain. They would drive her mad. She tried to stop her ears, but then those wedding chimes seemed ringing inside her head. She could not shut them out. She remembered how the joybells had haunted her ears on Rorie's twenty-first birthday—that day which had ended so bitterly, in the announcement of the engagement between the cousins. Yes, that had been her first real trouble, How well she remembered her despair and desolation that night, the rage that possessed her young soul.
"And I was little more than a child, then," she said to herself. "Surely I must have been born wicked. My dear father was living then; and even the thought of his love did not comfort me. I felt myself abandoned and alone in the world. How idiotically fond I must have been of Rorie. Ever so many years have come and gone, and I have not cured myself of this folly. What is there in him that I should care for him?"
She got up from the grass, plucked herself out of that paroxysm of mental pain which came too near lunacy, and began to walk slowly round the garden-paths, reasoning with herself, calling womanly pride to the rescue.
"I hate myself for this weakness," she protested dumbly. "I did not think I was capable of it. When I was a child, and was taken to the dentist, did I ever whine and howl like vulgar-minded children? No; I braced myself for the ordeal, and bore the pain, as my father's child ought."
She walked quickly to the house, burst into the parlour, where Miss Skipwith was sitting at her desk, the table covered with open volumes, over which flowers of literature the student roved, beelike, collecting honey for her intellectual hive.
"Please, Miss Skipwith, will you give me some books about Buddha?" said Vixen, with an alarming suddenness. "I am quite of your opinion: I ought to study. I think I shall go in for theology."
"My dearest child!" cried the ancient damsel, enraptured. "Thank Heaven! the seed I have sown has germinated at last. If you are once inspired with the desire to enter that vast field of knowledge, the rest will follow. The flowers you will find by the wayside will lure you onward, even when the path is stony and difficult."
"I suppose I had better begin with Buddha," said Vixen, with a hard and resolute manner that scarcely seemed like the burning desire for knowledge newly kindled in the breast of a youthful student. "That is beginning at the beginning, is it not?"
"No, my dear. In comparison with the priesthood of Egypt, Buddha is contemptibly modern. If we want the beginning of things, we must revert to Egypt, that cradle of learning and civilisation."
"Then let me begin with Egypt!" cried Vixen impatiently. "I don't care a bit how I begin. I want occupation for my mind."