“It is my belief, Alick,” said Mrs. Corfield, when she had left them to prepare for her visit, “that poor child is going crazy, if she is not so already.  She always was queer, but she is certainly not in her right mind now.  What a shame of Sebastian Dundas to bring her up as he has done, and now to leave her like this!  How glad I am I thought of having her at Steel’s Corner!”

“Yes, mother, it was a good thing.  Just like you, though,” said Alick affectionately.

“You must help me with her, Alick,” answered his mother.  “I have done what I know I ought to do, but she will be an awful nuisance all the same.  She is so odd and cold and impertinent, one does not know how to take her.”

Alick flushed and turned away his head.  “I will take her off your hands as much as I can,” he said in a constrained voice.

“That’s my dear boy—­do,” was his mother’s unsuspecting rejoinder as Leam came down stairs ready to go.

Steel’s Corner was a place of unresting intellectual energies.  Dr. Corfield, a man shut up in his laboratory with piles of extracts, notes, arguments, never used, but always to be used, an experimentalist deep in many of the toughest problems of chemical analysis, but neither ambitious nor communicative, was the one peaceable element in the house.  To be sure, Alick would have been both broader in his aims and more concentrated in his objects had he been left to himself.  As it was, the incessant demands made on him by his mother kept him too in a state of intellectual nomadism; and no one could weary of monotony where Mrs. Corfield set the pattern, unless it was of the monotony of unrest.  This perpetual taking up of new subjects, new occupations, made thoroughness the one thing unattainable.  Mrs. Corfield was a woman who went in for everything.  She was by turns scientific and artistic, a student and a teacher, but she was too discursive to be accurate, and she was satisfied with a proficiency far below perfection.  In philosophy she was what might be called a woman of antepenultimates, referring all the more intricate moral and intellectual phenomena to mind and spirit; but she was intolerant of any attempt to determine the causation of her favorite causes, and she derided the modern doctrines of evolution and inherent force as atheistic because materialistic.  The two words meant the same thing with her; and the more shadowy and unintelligible people made the causa causarum the more she believed in their knowledge and their piety.  The bitterest quarrel she had ever had was with an old friend, an unimaginative anatomist, who one day gravely proved to her that spirits must be mere filmy bags, pear-shaped, if indeed they had any visual existence at all.  Bit by bit he eliminated all the characteristics and circumstances of the human form on the principle of the non-survival of the useless and unadaptable.  For of what use are shapes and appliances if you have nothing for them to do?—­if