“Are not you? you look very understanding about everything,” said Lady Mary. She too, as well as Harry, had fallen in love with the doctor’s sister. The effect was not perhaps so sudden; but Lady Mary was a woman of warm sympathies, and sudden likings, and after a few hours in Margaret’s society she had quite yielded to her charm. She found it pleasant to look at so pretty a creature, pleasant to meet her interested look, her intelligent attention. There could not be a better listener, or a more delightful disciple; she might not perhaps know a great deal herself, but then she was so willing to adopt your views, or at least to be enlightened by them. Lady Mary sat by, and looked at her after the promenade round the conservatories, with all a woman’s admiration for beauty of the kind which women love. This, as all the world knows, is not every type; but Margaret’s drooping shadowy figure, her pathetic eyes, her soft paleness, and gentle deferential manner, were all of the kind that women admire. Lady Mary “fell in love” with the stranger. They were all three seated in the conservatory in the warm soft atmosphere, under the palm tree, and the evening was beginning to fall. The great fire in the drawing-room shone out like a red star in the distance, through all the drooping greenness of the plants, and they began half to lose sight of each other, shadowed, as this favourite spot was, by the great fan branches of the palm. “I think there never was such delightful luxury as this,” said Margaret, softly. “Italy must be like it, or some of the warm islands in the sea.” “In the South Sea?” said Lady Mary, smiling, “perhaps; but both the South Seas and Italy are homes of indolence, and I try all I can to keep that at arm’s length. But I assure you Herr Hartstong was not so poetical; he gave me several hints about the management of the heat. Do come to-morrow and hear him, my dear Mrs. Smith. Botany is wonderfully interesting. Many people think it a _dilettante_ young-lady-like science; but I believe in the hands of a competent professor it is something very different. Do let me interest you in my scheme. You know, I am sure, and must feel, how little means of education there are--and as little Sibby will soon be craving for instruction like my child--” “I suppose there is no good school for little girls here?” said Margaret, timidly; her tact told her that schools for little girls were not in question; but she did not know what else to say. “Oh!” said Lady Mary, with momentary annoyance; “for mere reading and writing, yes, I believe there is one; but it is the higher instruction I mean,” she added, recovering herself, “probably you have not had your attention directed to it; and to be sure in Scotland the standard is so much higher, and education so much more general.”