The visit was a great success. Lady Alice, with her tall, graceful figure, her winning face, her becoming dress, was a pleasant sight for the weary eyes of the women and children in the accident wards. Mrs. Bexley was wise enough not to take her near any very painful sights. Lady Alice talked to some of the little children and gave them toys: she made friends, rather shyly, with some of the women, and promised to come and see them again. Mrs. Bexley was well known in the hospital, and was allowed to stay an unusually long time. So it happened that one of the doctors, coming rather hurriedly into one of the wards, paused at the sight of a lady bending over one of the children's beds, and looked so surprised that one of the nurses hastened to explain that the stranger came with old Mrs. Bexley and was going away again directly. The doctor nodded, and went straight up to the child's bed. Lady Alice, raising herself after careful arrangement of some wooden animals on the sick child's table, came face to face with a very handsome man of about thirty, who seemed to be regarding her with especial interest. He moved away with a slight bow when she looked back at him, but he did not go far. He paused to chat with another little patient, and Lady Alice noticed that all the small faces brightened at the sight of him, and that two or three children called him imperiously to their bedsides. Something about him vaguely interested her--perhaps it was only his pleasant look, perhaps the affection with which he was regarded, perhaps the expression which his face had worn when he looked at her. She remembered him so well that she was able when she paid a second visit to the hospital to describe him to one of the Sisters, and ask his name. "Kenyon," she repeated, when it was told to her. "I suppose it is not an uncommon name?" Lesley had spoken of a Mr. Kenyon. It was not this Mr. Kenyon, of course! But it _was_ "this Mr. Kenyon;" and thus Maurice met the mother of the girl he loved in the ward of a London hospital, whither Lady Alice had been urged by that impulse towards "The Unexplored," of which her husband was the author. And in another ward of the same hospital lay a patient whose destiny was to influence the fates of both--an insensible man, whose name was unknown to the nurses, but whom Oliver would have recognized as his brother, Francis Trent. CHAPTER XXI. ETHEL REMONSTRATES.