"Ninety-nine."

"No doubt I shall fill that into an Intermediate schedule some day, but not yet awhile. I wonder if they will have reformed the Practical Chemistry by that time? Or will the dear old M.B. Lond. have lost its cachet altogether? It is warm to-day, is it not?”

"Frightfully! I met Miss Lascelles just now, and she informed me, in her bell-like voice, that if we were quite civilised we should go about without any clothes at all just now. I told her I hoped the relics of barbarism would last time."

out my

"Then I presume Miss Lascelles will not throw her pearls before swine again. Are you going to hospital?"

"Not to-day. Hospital is unbearable in this weather. The air is thick with microbes."

Mona looked at her friend reflectively. "Suppose you come down to Richmond with me," she said, "and blow away a few of the microbes on the river?"

"Oh, Mona, how lovely! But can you spare the time?" "Yes, I began early to-day. But we will have some lunch first. In the meantime I will sing you my last song, and you shall criticise."

"Are you still going on with your singing lessons? I can't think how you find time for it."

"I think it saves time in the end. It is a grand safetyvalve; and besides a woman is robbed of half her armour if she cannot use her voice."

Her hands ran lightly up and down the keys of the piano, and she began to sing Schubert's Ave Maria.

"Miss Dalrymple says that is my chef-d'œuvre," she said, when she had finished. "What think you?"

But Lucy made no answer.

"Mona," she said a minute later, "do you think it is worth while to go on the river, after all? It is rather a fag, and why should we?"

Her voice was husky, and suggestive of infinite weariness. Mona rose from the piano, and deliberately, almost brutally,

took the girl's face between her hands, and turned it to the light. She was not mistaken. The pretty eyes were dim with tears.

"Lucy," she said, "you and I have pretended long enough. What is the use of friendship, if we never fall back upon it in time of need? I want you to tell me what it was that spoilt your visit to Cannes."

'Nothing," said Lucy, with burning face, "unless, perhaps, my own idiocy. Oh, Mona, you dear old bully, there is not anything to tell! I thought I was always going to get the best of it with men, and now a man has got the best of it with me. It's only fair. Now you know the whole story. Despise me as much as you like."

"When I take to despising people, I imagine I shall have to begin even nearer home than with my plucky little Lucy. Will it be any use to tell me about it, do you think? Or is the whole story better buried?"

"I can't bury it. And yet there is positively nothing to tell. When I look back upon it all, I cannot honestly say that the flirtation went any farther than half-a-dozen others have gone; but this time, somehow, everything was different." "Is he a friend of the Munros?"

Lucy nodded. "Yes-you know-Mr Monteith. He arrived at the hotel the night of our first dance. I was wearing my mermaid costume for the first time, and—I saw him looking at me again and again. He was not particularly handsome, but there was a sort of bloom about him, don't you know? He made me feel so common and work-aday. And then when I danced with him I felt as if I had never danced with a man in my life before. I did not see very much of him;-Lady Munro was so particular;-but one afternoon a party of us walked up to the chapel on the hill, and he and I got apart from the others somehow. It was the first time I had seen the Maritime Alps, and I never again saw them as they were that day in the sunset light. It was like looking into a golden future. Well, he went away. I was awfully low-spirited for a day or two; but

somehow, whenever I thought of that evening on the hill, I felt as if the future was full of beautiful possibilities. One day we went to Monte Carlo, and there I met him again. He asked if I would like him to come back for a day or two to Cannes, and I said I did not care. He never came. Sometimes I wish I had begged him to,-yes, Mona, I have sunk as low as that-and sometimes I think he must have read my poor little secret all along, and I could kill myself for very shame. Oh, Mona, I wish you could take me out of myself!"

"You poor little soul! Lucy, dear, it sounds very trite and commonplace; but, by hook or by crook, you must get an interest in your hospital work, and go at it as hard as ever you can."

"It is no use. I hate hospital. I wonder now how I ever could care so much about prizes and marks and examinations. It is all such child's-play."

"Yes; but sorrow is not child's-play, and pain and death are not child's-play. It is only a question of working at it hard enough, old woman. You are bound to become interested in it in time, and that is the only way to get rid of yourself;—though it is strange teaching, perhaps, to come from self-centred me. They say we women of this generation have sacrificed a good deal of our birthright; don't let us throw away the grand compensation, the power to light our candles when the sun goes down. Do you remember Werther's description of the country lass whose sweetheart forsakes her, taking with him all the interest in her life? We at least have other interests, Lucy, and we can, if we try hard enough, turn the key on the suite of enchanted rooms, and live in the rest of the house."

"The rest of my house is a poky hole!" Mona sighed sympathetically.

"No matter," she said

resolutely; "we must just set to work, and make it some

thing better than a poky hole."

Further conversation was prevented for the time by the entrance of the luncheon-tray.

66

Well, is it to be Richmond?" said Mona, when the meal

was over.

Lucy blushed.

"I have a great mind to go to hospital, "I don't think it is quite so hot as

after all," she said.

it was."

"No, I think there is a suspicion of a breeze. Au revoir ! Come back soon."

I wish I could honestly say that Mona profited as much by Lucy's example as Lucy had by Mona's preaching; but I am forced to record that she did not open a book, nor return to her little laboratory, for the rest of the day. For a long time she sat in her rocking-chair with a frown on her brow. "I wonder if he has only been playing with her," she said"the cad!" Then another thought crossed the outskirts of her mind. At first it scarcely entered the limits of her consciousness; but, like the black dog in Faust, it went on and on, in ominous, ever-narrowing circles, and she was forced to recognise that she must grapple with it sooner or later. Then she put up her hands to cover her face, although there was no one there to see, and the question sounded in her very ears- "What if he has only been playing with me?"

What then, Mona? Lock the door on the suite of enchanted rooms, and live in the rest of the house! But she never thought of her advice to Lucy. She threw herself on the couch, and lay there for a little while in an agony of shame. After all her lofty utterances, had she given herself away to a man who had not even asked for her? Why had he not spoken just one word, to save her from this torture? By some curious chain of associations the words flashed into her mind

"Denn, was man schwarz auf weiss besitzt,
Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen."

She laughed a little breathlessly, and drew her hand across her damp forehead.

"I am a fool and a coward," she said; "I will ask Dr

Alice Bateson to give me a tonic. What do mere words matter, after all, between people like him and me?"

She walked up to a calendar that hung on the wall, and carefully counted the days till the second week in August. Then she sighed regretfully.

"Poor little Lucy," she said, "what an unsympathetic brute she must have thought me!"

CHAPTER XLIX.

THE INTERMEDIATE.

The classic precincts of Burlington House were once more invaded by a motley crowd of nervous, excited young men, who hung about the steps and entrance-hall, poring over their note-books, exchanging "tips," or coolly discussing the points of the women.

"None of them are so good-looking as the little girl with the red hair, who was up last year," Mona overheard one of them say, and she made a mental note to inform Lucy of her conquest.

About half-a-dozen girls were already assembled in the cloak-room when she entered.

"Well, Miss Maclean, how are you feeling?"

"Hardened," said Mona, taking off her hat, but she did not look particularly hardened.

"In my heart if calm at all,

If any calm, a calm despair,'"

quoted Miss Lascelles.

"Do tell me about the cardiac branches of the pneumogastric," said some one.

Miss Lascelles proceeded to give the desired information, while the others discussed the never-settled question of the number of marks required for a pass.