"The _platform_!" Mona laughed merrily. "If you put me on the platform with an audience in front of me, I should do what a fellow-student tells me she did on receipt of my last letter--'sit on the floor and howl'!" They both laughed. This anti-climax brought them comfortably down to everyday life again, and they talked about pleasant nothings for the rest of the way. "Look here, Dickinson," said Sir Douglas, when they entered the hotel; "I won't have you walking off with Mona for a whole day together. She is my property. Do you hear?" "I am sure it was I who discovered her on the hillside," Mona held up her finger protestingly. "Oh, I am Sir Douglas's invention, without a doubt," she said, putting her hand affectionately within her uncle's arm; "you only rediscovered me accidentally. What a pity it is that every great invention cannot speak for itself and give honest men their due!" The Sahib was very silent as he sat in the smoking-room that evening. He held a newspaper before him, for he did not wish to be disturbed; but he was not reading. In India he was looked upon almost as a woman-hater, so little did he care for the society of the young girls who came out there; and Mona's "cleverness" and culture, her earnest views of life, and the indefinable charm of manner which reminded him of Lady Munro, had all combined to make his short friendship with her a very genuine pleasure. Already he found himself thinking half-a-dozen times a day, "I wonder what Miss Maclean would say about this," or "I shall ask Miss Maclean her opinion of that;" and yet what a curious girl she was! It was a new experience to him to be told by an attractive young woman that he was a "moral Antiseptic"; and, in short, she puzzled him. Women always are a _terra incognita_ to men, as men are to women, as indeed every individual soul is to every other; but it might have been well for both of them if the Sahib could have read Mona at that moment even as well as she read him. He would have seen that she looked upon him precisely as she looked upon the women who were her friends; that it never occurred to her that he was man, and she woman, and that nothing more was required for the enaction of the time-worn drama; that, although she had taken no school-girl vow against matrimony, the idea of it had never seriously occupied her mind, so full was that mind of other thoughts and plans. He would have seen that the excitement and enthusiasm of adolescence had taken with her the form of an earnest determination to live to some good purpose; and that the thousand tastes and fancies, which had grouped themselves around this central determination, were not allowed seriously to usurp its place for a moment. But he did not see. He could only infer, and guess, and wonder. CHAPTER IX. DORIS. The steamer was fast approaching Newcastle.