the words with perfect truth, but were they true now? The question flashed like lightning through her mind, and the Sahib watched her with intense interest while she answered it. Her face grew very pale, and her lips trembled. She leaned her arm against the mantelpiece.

"Sahib," she said, "life gets so complicated, and it is so difficult to tell what one is bound to say. You asked me if -if-there was somebody else. There is somebody else; there was then. I did not lie to you. I did not know. And even now-he-has not said

She broke off abruptly, and left the room.

The Sahib lifted up the book she had laid down, and carefully read the title-page again, without really seeing one word. The question had indeed been settled for him, and at that moment he would have given wellnigh everything he possessed, if he could have been the man to win and marry Mona Maclean.

CHAPTER XLVII.

THE DISSECTING ROOM.

It was the luncheon-hour, and the winter term was drawing to a close. The dissecting-room was deserted by all save a few enthusiastic students who had not yet wholly exhausted the mysteries of Meckel's ganglion, the branches of the internal iliac, or the plantar arch. For a long time a hush of profound activity had hung over the room, and the silence had been broken only by the screams of a parrot and the cry of the cats'-meat-man in the street below; but by degrees the demoralising influence of approaching holidays had begun to make itself felt; in fact, to be quite frank, the girls were gossiping.

It was the dissector of Meckel's ganglion who began it. "If you juniors want a piece of advice," she said, laying down her forceps,-"a thing, by the way, which you never do want, till an examination is imminent, and even then you don't take it, you may have it for nothing. Form a clear mental picture of the spheno-maxillary fossa. When you have that, the neck of anatomy is broken. Miss Warden, suppose, just to refresh all our memories, you run over the foramina opening into the spheno-maxillary fossa, and the structures passing through them."

The dissector of the plantar arch groaned.

"Don't!" she entreated in assumed desperation. "With the examination so near, it makes me quite ill to be asked a question. I should not dare to go up, if Miss Clark were not going."

"I should not have thought she was much stand-by." Oh, but she is! If she passes, I may hope to. I was dissecting the popliteal space the other day, and she asked me if it was Scarpa's triangle!"

A murmur of incredulity greeted this statement.

"She has not had an inferior extremity," said a young girl, turning away from the cupboard in which the skeleton hung. "You can only learn your anatomy by dissecting yourself."

"It is a heavy price to pay," said she of the sphenomaxillary fossa; "and a difficult job at the best, I should fancy."

There was a general laugh, in which the girl at the cupboard joined.

"Where it is completed by the communicating branch of the dorsalis pedis," said Miss Warden irrelevantly. "I am no believer in Ellis and Ford myself," she went on, looking up, "but I do think one might learn from it the general whereabouts of Scarpa's triangle."

"Come now, Miss Warden, you know we don't believe that story. Have you decided whether to go to Edinburgh or Glasgow for your second professional, Miss Philips?"

"Oh, Glasgow," said the investigator of the internal iliac, almost impatiently. "I need all the time I can get. I have not begun to read the brain and special sense.

can one get a bullock's eye?"

"At Dickson's, I fancy."

Where

"And where can one see a dissection of the ear? It is

so unsatisfactory getting it up from books."

"There is a model of it in the museum."

"Model!"

tempt.

The word was spoken with infinite con

"Do you know what it is, Miss Philips? You are thrown away on those Scotch examinations.

in for the London degree?"

"Matric.," was the laconic response.

"Oh, the Matric. is nothing!"

Why did you not go

"Besides, I could not afford the time. Six years, even if one was lucky enough not to get ploughed."

“Talking of being ploughed," said a student who had just entered the room, "you won't guess whom I have just met? -Miss Maclean."

"Miss Maclean -in London ?"

She

"In the chemical laboratory at the present moment. is going up for her Intermediate again, in July." "Who is Miss Maclean?" asked the girl who had been studying the skeleton.

There was a general exclamation.

"Not to know her, my dear," said the new-comer, "argues yourself-quite beneath notice. Miss Maclean is one of the Intermediate Chronics."

"Miss Maclean is an extremely clever girl," said Miss Warden.

"When I first came to this school," said Miss Philips, "I wrote to my people that women medical students were very much like other folks, but that one or two were really splendid women; and I instanced Miss Maclean."

"The proof of the student is the examination."

"That is not true-except very broadly. You passed your

Intermediate at the first go-off, but none of us would think of comparing you to Miss Maclean."

"Thank you," was the calm reply. "I always did appreciate plain speaking. It is quite true that I never went in for very wide reading, nor for the last sweet thing in theories; but I have a good working knowledge of my subjects all the same—at least I had at the time I passed.”

"Miss Maclean is too good a student; that is what is the matter with her."

"Miss

The dissector of Meckel's ganglion laughed. Maclean is awfully kind and helpful," she said; "but I shall never forget the day when I asked her to show me the nerve to the vastus externus on her own dissection. She drew aside a muscle with hooks, and opened up a complicated system of telephone wires that made my hair stand on end."

"I know. For one honest nerve with a name, she shows you a dozen that are nameless; and the number of abnormalities that she contrives to find is simply appalling."

"In other words, she has a spirit of genuine scientific research," said Miss Philips. "It does not say much for the examiners that such a woman should fail."

A student who had been studying a brain in the corner of the room, looked up at this moment, tossing back a mass of short dark hair from her refined and intellectual face.

"Poor examiners," she said. "Who would wish to stand in their shoes? Miss Maclean may be a good student, and she may have a spirit of genuine scientific research; but nobody fails for either of those reasons. Miss Maclean sees things very quickly, and she sees them in a sense exactly. She puts the nails in their right places, so to speak, and gives them a rap with the hammer; she fits in a great many more than there is any necessity for, but she does not drive them home. Then, when the examination comes, some of the most essential ones have dropped out, and have to be looked for all over again. It was a fatal mistake, too, to begin her Final work before she had passed her Inter

mediate. I don't know what subject Miss Maclean failed in, but I am not in the least surprised that she failed."

Her audience heard the last sentence in a kind of nightmare; for Mona had entered the room, and was standing listening, a few yards behind the speaker. The girl turned round quickly, when she saw the conscious glances.

"I did not know you were there, Miss Maclean," she said proudly, indignant with herself for blushing.

Mona drew a stool up to the same table, and sat down. "It is I who ought to apologise, Miss Lascelles," she said, "for listening to remarks that were not intended for me; but I was so much interested that I did not stop to think. One so seldom gets the benefit of a perfectly frank diagnosis."

"I don't know that it was perfectly frank. Some one was abusing the examiners, and I spoke in hot blood—”

"It seems to me that statements made in hot blood are the only ones worth listening to-if we have a germ of poetry in us. Statements made in cold blood always prove to be truisms when you come to analyse them."

"And one thing I said was not even true-I was surprised when you failed."

Mona was not listening. "What you said was extremely sensible," she said, "but so neatly put that one is instinctively on one's guard against it. It is a dreary metaphor-driving in nails; and, if it be a just one, it describes exactly my quarrel with medicine, from an examination point of view. Why does not one big nail involve a lot of little ones? Or rather, why may we not develop like trees, taking what conduces to our growth, and rejecting the rest? Why are we doomed to make pigeon-holes, and drive in nails?" "But the knowledge a doctor requires is in a sense unlike any other. He wants it, not for himself, but for other people."

"And so we come back to the eternal question, whether a man benefits humanity more by self-development or selfsacrifice? Does knowledge that is fastened on as an appendage ever do any good? Have not the great specialists, the