“You ought to show it to him,” said John.

“You ought,” said Jock.

“Do you know much about him?” asked Mother Carey.  “I don’t think I ever saw him, though I know his name.  A fashionable physician, is he not?”

“A very good man,” said John.  “A great West-end swell just come to be the acknowledged head in his own line.  I suppose it is just what my uncle would have been ten years ago, if he had been spared.”

“May we show it to him, mother?” said Jock.  “I should think he was quite to be trusted with it.  I see!  I was reading an account of this method of his to Dr. Lucas one day, and he was much interested and tried to tell me something about my father; but it was after his speech grew so imperfect, and he was so much excited and distressed that I had to lead him away from the subject.”

“Yes, Dr. Lucas’s incredulity made all the difference.  How old is Dr. Ruthven, John?”

“A little over forty, I should say.  He may have been a pupil of my uncle’s.”

After a little more consultation, it was decided that John should write to Dr. Ruthven that his cousin had some papers of his father’s which he thought the Doctor might like to see, and that they would bring them if he would make an appointment,

And so the Magnum Bonum was no longer a secret, a burden, and a charge!

It was not easy to tell whether she who had so long been its depositary felt the more lightened or disappointed.  She had reckoned more than she knew upon the honour of the discovery being connected with the name of Brownlow, and she could not quite surmount the feeling that Dr. Ruthven had somehow robbed her husband, though her better sense accepted and admired the young men’s argument that such discoveries were common property, and that the benefit to the world was the same.

Allen was a good deal struck when he understood the matter.  He said it explained a good deal to him which the others had been too young to observe or remember both in the old home and afterwards.

“One wonderful part of it is how you kept the secret, and Janet too!” he said.  “And you must often have been sorely tempted.  I remember being amused at your disappointment and her indignation when I said I didn’t see why a man was bound to be a doctor because his father was before him; and I suppose if Bobus or I had taken to it, this Ruthven need not have been beforehand with us!”

“It would have been transgressing the conditions to hold it out to you.”

“I don’t imagine I could have done it any way,” said Allen, sighing.  “I never can enter into the taste the others have for that style of thing; but Bobus might have succeeded.  You must have expected it of him, at the time when he and I used to laugh at what we thought was a monomania on your part for our taking up medical science as a tribute to our father, when we did not need it as a provision.”