It may be doubted whether the photographs, Dr. Medlicott, or even Jock were the attraction.  He was much more fond of using his privilege of dropping in when the family were alone, than of finding himself in the midst of what an American guest had called Mrs. Brownlow’s surprise parties.  They were on regular evenings, but no one knew who was coming, from scientific peers to daily governesses, from royal academicians to medical students, from a philanthropic countess to a city missionary.  To listen to an exposition of the microphone, to share in a Shakespeare reading, or worse still, in a paper game, was, in the Captain’s eyes, such a bore that he generally had only haunted Collingwood Street on home days and on Sundays, when, for his mother’s sake and his own, an exception was made in his favour.

He followed Babie with unusual alacrity, and found Mrs. Brownlow shaking hands with a youth whom Jock upheld as a genius, but who laboured under the double misfortune of always coming too soon, and never knowing what to do with his arms and legs.  He at once perceived Captain Evelyn to be an “awful swell,” and became trebly wretched—-in contrast to Jock’s open-hearted, genial young dalesman, who stood towering over every one with his broad shoulders and hearty face, perfectly at his ease (as he would have been in Buckingham Palace), and only wondering a little that Brownlow could stand an empty-headed military fop like that; while Cecil himself, after gazing about vaguely, muttered to Babie something about her cousin.

“She is gone to see whether Lina is asleep, and will be too shy to come down again if I don’t drag her.”

So away flew Babie, and more eyes than Cecil Evelyn’s were struck when in ten minutes’ time she again led in her cousin.

Mr. Acton, who was talking to Mrs. Brownlow, said in an undertone—-

“Your model?  Another niece?”

“Yes; you remember Jessie?”

“This is a more ideal face.”

It was true.  Esther had lived much less than her elder sister in the Coffinkey atmosphere, and there was nothing to mar the peculiar dignified innocence and perfect unconsciousness of her sweet maidenly bloom.  She never guessed that every man, and every woman too, was admiring her, except the strong-minded one who saw in her the true inane Raffaelesque Madonna on whom George Eliot is so severe.

Nor did the lady alter her opinion when, at the end of a very curious speculation about primeval American civilisation, Captain Evelyn and Miss Brownlow were discovered studying family photographs in a corner, apparently much more interested whether a hideous half-faded brown shadow had resembled John at fourteen, than to what century and what nation those odd curly-whirleys on stone belonged, and what they were meant to express.

Babie was scandalised.

“You didn’t listen!  It was most wonderful!  Why Armie went down and fetched up Allen to hear about those wonderful walled towns!”