“I can’t make out.  She has only been with us twice in these four years, once at Sorrento and once in London; but she has a very active dislike to Mrs. Evelyn, and vexes her mother by making no secret of it.  I believe she is to take her degree at Zurich this spring, but I don’t think she means to practise.  She is too well off for the drudgery, but she is bent on making researches of some kind, and I think I heard of some plan of her going to attend lectures, to which her degree may admit her, but I am not sure where.  The two Miss Rays seem to be happy to escort her anywhere, and that is a sort of comfort to Mrs. Brownlow.  Miss Ray keeps us informed of their comings and goings, for Janet seldom deigns to write.”

“It is very strange that there should be such alienation, and from such a mother.”

“The two characters are as unlike as can be, but I have always thought there must be some cause that no one but Janet herself could perhaps explain.  I cannot help thinking that she has some definite purpose in this study of medicine; for I do not think it is for the sake either of the emancipation of women or of general philanthropy.  They must be an odd party.  Miss Ray attends to the household matters, mends the clothes, and pays the bills.  Nita sketches, reads at the libraries, and talks at the table d’hote, like a strong-minded woman, as she is; and Janet goes her own way.  Bobus looked in on them once and described them to us with great gusto.”

There Mary’s face became illuminated as a step approached, and a gentleman with grizzled hair, and a thoughtful, gentle face came out, and sat down on her other side.

He had been college tutor to her brother, though not much older, and had stayed on at Oxford, till two years back he had taken a much neglected living.  His health had broken down under the severe work of organising, and he had accepted the easy task of reading with Armine Brownlow for the winter in a perfect climate, as a welcome mode of recruiting his strength.  He had truly recruited it in an unexpected manner, and was about to take home with him one who would prove such a helpmeet as would lighten all the troubles and difficulties that had weighed so heavily on him, and remove some of them entirely.

So he came out and testified to the remarkable ability and zeal he had found in his pupil, and likewise to the spirit of industry which had prevented the desultory life of travelling and ill-health from having made him nearly so much behindhand as might have been expected.  If he only had health to work steadily for the next two years, he would be quite as well prepared to matriculate at the university as all but the very foremost scholars from the public schools.  Mr. Morgan thought his intellect equal to that of his brother Robert, who had taken a double first-class, but of a finer order, being open to those poetical instincts which went for nothing with the materialistic Bobus.