"Mademoiselle Delrue is a Protestant," said Mrs. Raynor; when, on this same evening, Edina ventured to speak a word upon the subject, as Kate and Robert said good-night and left the drawing-room. "I know she is," said Edina. "But none but a mother should, in these vital matters, train her children. You always used to do it, Mary." "If you only knew how fully my time and thoughts are occupied!" returned Mrs. Raynor, in a tone of great deprecation. "We live in a whirl here: and it is rather too much for me. And, to tell you the truth, Edina, I sometimes wonder whether the old life, with all its straitened means, was not the happier; whether we have in all respects improved matters, in coming to Eagles' Nest." CHAPTER II. APPREHENSIONS. The fine old house, Eagles' Nest, lay buried in snow. It was Christmas-tide, and Christmas weather. All the Raynor family had assembled within its walls: with the exception of Dr. Raynor and his daughter Edina. Charles had come home from keeping his first term at Oxford; Alfred from school; Frank Raynor and his wife had returned from their sojourn abroad. All these past months, during which we have lost sight of them, Frank and Daisy had been on the Continent. Almost immediately after their departure from Trennach, Frank, through his medical friend, Crisp, was introduced to a lady who was going to Switzerland with her only son; a sickly lad of fifteen, in whom the doctors at home had hardly been able to keep life. This lady, Mrs. Berkeley, proposed to Frank to travel with them as medical attendant on her son, and she had not the least objection to Frank's wife being of the party. So preliminaries were settled, and they started. Frank considered it a most opportune chance to have fallen to him while waiting for the missing money to turn up. But the engagement did not last long. Hardly had they settled in Switzerland when the lad died, and Mrs. Berkeley returned to England. Frank stayed on where he was. The place and the sojourn were alike pleasant; and, as he remarked to his wife, who knew but he might pick up a practice there, amongst the many English residents of the town, or those who flocked to it as birds of passage? Daisy was just as delighted to remain as he: they had funds in hand, and could afford to throw care to the winds. Even had care declared itself: which it did not. The young are sanguine, rarely gifted with much forethought. Frank and his wife especially lacked it. A few odds and ends of practice did drop into Frank, just a small case or so, at long intervals: and they remained stationary for some time in perfect complacency. But when Christmas approached, and Frank found that his five hundred pounds would not hold out for ever, and that the idea of a practice in the Swiss town was a mere castle in the air, he took his wife home again. By invitation, they went at once to Eagles' Nest.