She stopped short. At Christmas she could have said the words with perfect truth, but were they true now? The question flashed like lightning through her mind, and the Sahib watched her with intense interest while she answered it. Her face grew very pale, and her lips trembled. She leaned her arm against the mantelpiece. "Sahib," she said, "life gets so complicated, and it is so difficult to tell what one is bound to say. You asked me if--if--there was somebody else. There is somebody else; there was then. I did not lie to you. I did not know. And even now--he--has not said----" She broke off abruptly, and left the room. The Sahib lifted up the book she had laid down, and carefully read the title-page again, without really seeing one word. The question had indeed been settled for him, and at that moment he would have given wellnigh everything he possessed, if he could have been the man to win and marry Mona Maclean. CHAPTER XLVII. THE DISSECTING-ROOM. It was the luncheon-hour, and the winter term was drawing to a close. The dissecting-room was deserted by all save a few enthusiastic students who had not yet wholly exhausted the mysteries of Meckel's ganglion, the branches of the internal iliac, or the plantar arch. For a long time a hush of profound activity had hung over the room, and the silence had been broken only by the screams of a parrot and the cry of the cats'-meat-man in the street below; but by degrees the demoralising influence of approaching holidays had begun to make itself felt; in fact, to be quite frank, the girls were gossiping. It was the dissector of Meckel's ganglion who began it. "If you juniors want a piece of advice," she said, laying down her forceps,--"a thing, by the way, which you never do want, till an examination is imminent, and even then you don't take it,--you may have it for nothing. Form a clear mental picture of the spheno-maxillary fossa. When you have that, the neck of anatomy is broken. Miss Warden, suppose, just to refresh all our memories, you run over the foramina opening into the spheno-maxillary fossa, and the structures passing through them." The dissector of the plantar arch groaned. "_Don't!_" she entreated in assumed desperation. "With the examination so near, it makes me quite ill to be asked a question. I should not dare to go up, if Miss Clark were not going." "I should not have thought she was much stand-by." "Oh, but she is! If she passes, I may hope to. I was dissecting the popliteal space the other day, and she asked me if it was Scarpa's triangle!" A murmur of incredulity greeted this statement. "She has not had an inferior extremity," said a young girl, turning away from the cupboard in which the skeleton hung. "You can only learn your anatomy by dissecting yourself." "It is a heavy price to pay," said she of the spheno-maxillary fossa: "and a difficult job at the best, I should fancy."