'No, dear Haco, it is not gray. It is exactly the colour it was yesterday, when the sun shone in upon you bending over that poor little boy's bed; and I felt, as I looked at you, He might be a girl -he might be a younger sister.'

Haco looked at her and with an imploring glance, he said,

'I will repeat you something I have read since I came into the wards. I found it in the torn corner

of a newspaper, where a reviewer had quoted it. It has refused to leave my recollection.

666 Ah, love let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here, as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggling and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.'

'No, it is not so bad as that,' said Lady Mary. 'Why,' continued Haco, 'in the very recess of this window where we are standing, a gra

velled veteran stood for hours-all through the midnight. To-morrow he will mount the table, and will refuse to take chloroform, and Nature, shocked at the heart, will pluck him. I asked him, as he stood there moaning low to himself, what he was thinking about. "My wife's white mutch," he replied. He is a poor stone-polisher from the north, and all that remains to him the night before his death-for he will die; Crum says a hundred to one that he will die-is the recollection of his wife's white mutch. Lady Mary, I believe that Nature's pluck is extinction, and that nothing is left us but love—

"Ah, love, let us be true

To one another.'"

Lady Mary looked at him. He had been very ardent and excited, and, though she had put love by as not her mission in life, she felt a momentary thrill as their eyes glanced and kindled on meeting each other's confronting gaze.

'Notwithstanding your feeling about old age, you are really very, very young yet, Haco. Do not dream so much, and act more, and you will be less sad. And now,' she added rapidly, 'you have taken my hand, and you have had my fingers at your lips exactly as if I were Youth at the helm and you were Pleasure who had crept away from the prow; and you will be going away with the impression that I have allowed you to fall in love with me. I have not, Haco; I have not indeed. All that is out of the question for me. I am serving in this temple of the weak and the sick and the dying, and must be allowed to be a priestess without solicitation of affection. I like you, Haco, and shall always be pleased to help you in any other way than with the love you seem to invite. Now, when I am removed to Vienna, I shall always think of you with gratitude for the assistance you have given me in my work. But no love!'

She turned and saw Mrs Blake at her back; but

she was perfectly serene and self-possessed-a circumstance which the head nurse attributed to her

ancient descent, and not to her hypocrisy, to which she would have attributed it in the case of a girl with a common origin.

'I can assure you,' said Mrs Blake, though I came upon them in the corridor, and Mr Spens, at six o'clock in the morning, with his face unwashed, proposing marriage to her, and her saying, "No, love," she turned round on me as if nothing were occurring. See what it is, Mrs Pechey, to have a family tree.'

So spoke the head-nurse to another head-nurse who visited her in her room, and took something out of a bottle labled 'Poison.'

'A boy and a girl,' said Mrs Pechey.

'No doubt,' said Mrs Blake.

VOL II

I

CHAPTER X

AIRING THE CHILDREN

THE summer session in Edinburgh can grow very monotonous. Half the professors are gone away to the country to enjoy themselves in the sunshine, and to write one new lecture against the coming session. One is enough, for the average duration of a professor's life is twenty-five years after his appointment, and twenty-five lectures in that time amply fulfil all the purposes of prelection. The remainder are written in the first year of occupancy of the chair, which demands unprecedented effort. It