"Wrong!" repeated Doris scornfully. "Moral wrong! Is it nothing then for a girl to lose her _bloom_?" Her face was burning, and her breath came fast. "Young men," she said, scarcely above a whisper, "and all those students--mere boys! It drives me mad!" Mona rose and kissed her. "Dearest," she said, "you are the _preux chevalier_ of your sex, and I love you for it with all my heart. I feel the force of what you say, though one learns in time to be silent, and not even to think of it more than need be. But indeed, you make yourself more unhappy than you should. Some of the young men of whom you speak so scornfully are truly scientific, and many of them have infinite kindness of heart." "Don't let us talk of it. I cannot bear it. But oh, Mona, go on with your work--_go on_!" She kissed her friend almost passionately and left the room. "There goes," thought Mona, "a woman with a pure passion for an abstract cause--a woman whose shoe-latchets I am not worthy to unloose." CHAPTER X. BORROWNESS. The next afternoon the grey ponies trotted Mona down to Granton. It was strange to find herself on the deck of a steamer once more; the same experience as that of yesterday, and yet how different! Yesterday she had been the centre of her little circle--admired, flattered, indulged by every one; to-day she was nothing and nobody--a young woman travelling alone. And yesterday, she kept assuring herself, was the anomaly, the exception; to-day was in the ordinary course of things--a fair average sample of life. It would have been strange if her thoughts had been very bright ones, and a heavy ground-swell on the Forth did not tend to make them any brighter. "It's a cross-water, ye ken," an old countryman was explaining to a friend. "They say ye might cross the Atlantic, an' no' get onything waur." The wind was chill and cutting, and it carried with it an easterly haar, that seemed to penetrate to Mona's very marrow. She was thankful when they reached Burntisland, and she found herself ensconced in a dirty, uncomfortable third-class carriage. "If Borrowness is your destination," Mr Colquhoun had said, "it is not a question of getting there sooner or later; it is a question of never getting there at all;" and so Mona began to think, as the train drew up for an indefinite period at every little station. And yet she was not anxious to hasten her arrival. The journey from Edinburgh to Borrowness was short and simple, compared with that which her mind had to make from the life behind to the life before. "I have no right to enter upon it in the spirit of a martyr," she said to herself, "even if that would make it any easier. For better or worse it is all my own doing. And I will not dream the time away in prospects and memories. I will take up each day with both hands, and live it with all my might." The twilight was beginning to gather when at length the guard shouted "Borrowness!" and Mona sprang to her feet and looked out.