At night, I got the chambermaid to lock me in that atrocious little cabin of mine. (Oh, I know you are laughing, Berthalina; good gracious! what a fool I feel about it all.) I knew that he was an early riser, and I did not go down the next morning till I felt sure that he would be enjoying the sea-breezes, and that the coffee-room would be nearly empty. There he was, patiently keeping guard over the table in the window! He strode across to me (he is so huge and self-assured and important-looking, that everyone turns to watch him, and the waiters fly at a glance). "I have kept our table," he said, "and I have taken the liberty to order for you the same breakfast you had yesterday." After that, I gave up trying to avoid him. I had put everything right in his mind, and it was only for four days! Then I must be getting back, and looking out for ways and means to earn the money I have borrowed to pay my fees and keep me at the hospital. Oh dear! How it all weighs on my mind! "And so you are going to be a doctor?" he said once, I don't know at which meeting. How can I tell--there were so many! "I am a doctor," I corrected him. "Well, I am a doctor too," he said. "And perhaps that is the reason I loathe the thought of any woman meddling in that profession." "I don't particularly like it myself," I told him. "It was necessary for me to be something, and I had enthusiasm enough to begin with; but----" "What is your sister?" he asked me suddenly; it took me by surprise, but I told him, with blushes, that she was a doctor too. "I wonder what my brother will say to that?" he pondered. "You look surprised. Is there any reason I should not have a brother? He is a doctor like myself, and shares my prejudices." "Those prejudices don't affect my sister," I took courage to remark. "They should. No decent woman can afford to despise the prejudices of a decent man. The place of a young and beautiful woman is not----" "I did not tell you she was young or beautiful. I--she--we are thirty years old; and 'pretty,' 'interesting,' 'fine-looking,' are the most complimentary epithets which have ever been applied to us." "We don't all see with the same eyes," the man said. It was on our last evening that I sate on a chair in the hotel gardens; he came and smoked his cigar beside me. "You go to-morrow?" he said. I nodded. "And you don't purpose to tell me where you go?" I shook my head. How can I have him coming to my place with that story of my sister--? "So here, for ever, we say good-bye. I go back to my practice in Sydney; and you----?" I said nothing to fill up the pause. "Four days!" he mused, and was silent. The band was playing on the pier; the strains of that pretty thing Hayden Coffin sings in _The Greek Slave_ came sorrowfully to us across the sea and the sand. The people in their smart seaside costumes went trooping past.