“Oh, I just happened to be out here. I didn’t sleep very well,” he explained, airily, and went off well satisfied with his own readiness of resource, not dreaming that Georgia, in her own room, was saying bitterly to herself as she took down her hair-- “He need not have told me so particularly that he didn’t get up because of me. I knew he did not, of course, but it wasn’t necessary for him to say it. Well, I shall not presume upon his kindness, although he is afraid I may.” The natural consequence of this deceitful excess of candour on Dick’s part was, that when he met her next, he found that he had lost any ground which his ready services might have gained for him in Miss Keeling’s estimation. For him the events of the early morning had cast a glamour over the rest of the day, and when he saw Georgia again towards evening, he was prepared to meet her with the friendliness natural between two people who had found the barrier of prejudice which separated them partially broken down. But she received him with the easy graciousness she would have shown to the merest acquaintance, expressing her gratitude for his kindness, indeed, but ignoring entirely the approach to something like intimacy which he thought had been established between them. Dick was not accustomed to be repulsed in this way, and when he overheard Georgia telling Sir Dugald how fortunate it had been for her that she found Major North up when she returned, and how kind he had been in getting her some coffee, his wrath, if not loud, was deep. She was betraying what he liked to think of as a secret known only to their two selves, and making an ass of him before the other fellows. This led him to remember that, after all, circumstances were unchanged. Georgia was still a doctor, and displayed no symptoms of being convinced, whether against her will or otherwise, by his arguments against the existence of medical women, or of discontinuing the practice of her profession. Nay more, Dick was beginning to see that it was unlikely she would ever be so convinced, and that if there was to be peace between them it must be on the basis of acquiescence in facts as they were. Hence, as he was still determined under no circumstances to extend even the barest toleration to lady doctors, it is not surprising that Dick felt himself a much injured man, and that his soul revolted a dozen times a-day against the conclusions at which he had been forced to arrive.