"I can't help that. Now I wonder if you mean to take my advice as well as my tonic?" She asked the question quite dispassionately, as if it only interested her in an abstract way. "If you don't accept a fee," Mona said, in an injured tone, "you bind me over to take your advice." "Ah! if that's the case, I wish I could afford to refuse fees from all my patients. Good-bye. Send me a line from Bournemouth to tell me how you get on. I wish I could be of more use to you!" And for the first time a look of very genuine sympathy shot from the honest brown eyes. "Well?" said Sir Douglas, when he saw Mona next day. "Dr Bateson says I am to go to Bournemouth with Aunt Maud." "Nonsense! Did she really?" Warmly as Sir Douglas approved of women-doctors, it was a source of great surprise to him that they should recommend anything sensible. And so it came to pass that Mona began by degrees to pick up fresh health and strength in spite of everything. She could not shake off her worry; but day by day, to her own surprise, it weighed on her more bearably. One morning near the end of April she took up a copy of the _Times_, and her eye fell on the following notice--"On the 23d inst., at Carlton Lodge, Borrowness, Eleanor Jane, relict of the late George Hamilton, Esq., J.P. and D.L. of the County, in her 79th year." "So she came home to die," Mona thought; "and now--now I suppose he will come up to London and go on with his work. I wonder if he will present himself at Burlington House for his medal next month? For, if he does, I shall see him." And it was well that Presentation Day was so near, or Dr Bateson might have been disappointed, after all, in the results of her prescription. CHAPTER LIV. PRESENTATION DAY. The eventful day dawned at last, clear and bright, with a summer sky and a fresh spring breeze. "One would think I was a bride at the very least," Mona said, laughing, when Lucy and Evelyn came in to help her to dress. "If you think we would take this amount of trouble for a common or garden bride," said Lucy loftily, "you are profoundly mistaken. Bride, indeed!" Sir Douglas had insisted on giving Mona an undergraduate's gown, heavy and handsome as it could be made; and the sight of her in that, and in a most becoming trencher, did more to reconcile him to her study of medicine than any amount of argument could have done. "Distinctly striking!" was Mona's comment, when Lucy and Evelyn stopped dancing round her, and allowed her to see herself in the pier-glass. And she was perfectly right. Never in all her bright young life had she looked so charming as she did that Presentation Day. "You will go to the function to day, Ralph?" said Melville to his friend the same morning. "Not I! God bless my soul! when a man has graduated at Edinburgh and Cambridge, he can afford to dispense with a twopenny-halfpenny function at Burlington House."