"I have not written for a long time. I shall send my next to her man of business." "And won't I just give Mona a vivid account of how I came to do it!" she added mentally. "Have you seen this lady--Mona's cousin? I don't know anything about her." "No, I have not. I believe she is very quiet, and elderly, and respectable,--and dull; the sort of person in whose house one can get through a lot of work." "Humph," growled Sir Douglas. "A nice life for a girl like Mona!" "I am sure I wish she were here!" Sir Douglas looked at her. "Some of us," he said quietly, "wish that every day of our lives. I called the other day to take her for a drive in the Park, but found she had left her old rooms." And then he told the story of his little misadventure of a few days before. "Oh," said Lucy, "what a terrible pity! Mona loves driving in the Park. Do go for her again some day when she is working in London. You have no idea what a treat a drive in the Park is to people who have been poring over their bones, and their books, and their test-tubes." "Well, what in the name of all that is incomprehensible does she do it for? She might drive in the Park every day if she chose." "But then," said Lucy, "she would not be Mona." The muscles of his face relaxed, and then contracted again. "Even admitting," he said, "that all is well just now, how will it be ten years hence?" "Ten years hence," said Evelyn, "Mona will have married a clever young doctor. Lucy says the students have several times married the lecturers." Sir Douglas frowned. "I should just like to see," he flashed out angrily, "the young doctor who would presume to come and ask me for Mona! I hate the whole trade. Why, that young fellow I told you about, who came to my rescue, was infinitely superior to most of them--cultured, and travelled, and that sort of thing--but, bless my soul! he was not a man of the world. I would sooner see Mona in a convent than give her to a whipper-snapper like that!" "Evelyn is wrong," said Lucy. "Mona will not marry. She never thinks of that sort of thing. Ten years hence she will be a little bit matronly, by reason of all the girls and women she will have mothered. Her face will be rather worn perhaps, but in my eyes at least she will be beautiful." "And in yours, Douglas," said Lady Munro, "she will still be the bright young girl that she is to-day." She laughed softly as she spoke, but the laugh was a rather half-hearted one. She had learnt the difference between the fruit that is in a man's hand, and the fruit that is just out of reach. CHAPTER XXXV. WEEPING AND LAUGHTER. Sir Douglas had gone to see his friend, but it was still too early for the concert, so Lady Munro and the girls strolled round to the terrace overlooking the sea. "How lovely, how lovely!" said Lucy. "I wonder if there is any view in all the world like this?"