Our father took a great pride in Raymond, and carefully supervised his studies. He passed various brilliant examinations, and at eighteen, having decided to go in for medicine, was already walking a hospital. Shortly after this our father died suddenly. He was at work as usual in his laboratory when he was seized by a paralytic stroke, and in three days he was dead. This blow quite stunned us for a time. Our father was everything to us; and the possibility of his death we had never contemplated. Though, as I have explained, he had always left us free to follow our own devices, still he was the centre round which our family life circled; we were passionately attached to him, and now that he was gone we felt at a loss indeed. We had no relatives living of our father's; our mother's family we had never known, and they were too distant to be practically available. Our father's friends were not such as to be of much help to us. Cat enthusiasts and scientific dreamers are all very well in their way, but they almost always take far more than they give in the mart of friendship. The old professor had preceded my father to his grave. Our father left us comfortably off. The house was our own, and property yielding a comfortable income was divided equally between us. Our home seemed desolate indeed without our father, and very gloomily did the first months of his absence pass; but in time hope and youth reasserted themselves and we gradually settled down to much our old way of life. Caroline obtained several engagements and was still studying enthusiastically. Raymond passed most of his time at the hospital, where he had rooms, though he frequently came home; I was the only one who had not a definite occupation. I read a great deal and wrote a little also, chiefly studies on historical subjects which interested me, but I had printed nothing. In fact I had never been in the way of the literary world, and did not know how to set about it. Time used often to hang rather heavily on my hands in the big house where I was generally alone. I was the housekeeper, but such cares did not take up much of my time. The result of so much solitude and lack of occupation was that I became restless and dissatisfied. Mere reading without any definite object did not and could not suffice me; to write when there seemed no prospect of ever being read, and keenly alive as I was to my own deficiencies, did not attract me; friends I might say I had none, for the few people my father knew were interested in him and not in us children, and ceased to frequent our house after his death. Caroline's musical friends did not appeal to me, so that the whole interest of my life was centred round my brother. When he came home we used always to be together, and conversation never flagged. Never having been to school he had none of the schoolboy's patronising contempt for a sister. We had always been chums and companions, and so we continued, but whereas, as children,