Perhaps it was the best thing he could have done, since nothing short of despair would have affected Dr. Carmichael, who had by this time become so absorbed in the effort to understand life that he had almost forgotten how to feel it. People wondered why a man, who had gained a European reputation for his researches, should have cared to linger on in a remote country district like Gleneira, and some went so far as to hint that something more than mere displeasure at his brother's disobedience lay at the bottom of his dislike to the marriage and his subsequent misanthropy. Be that as it may, his first look at little Marjory's curly head was absolutely unemotional, and he remarked to his housekeeper that it was a good thing she seemed to take more after her mother than her father, who had always been a cause of anxiety. For the rest, it was a pity she was not a boy. Orphans should always be boys; it simplified matters so much for the relations. However, Mrs. Campbell, the housekeeper, must make the best of it, and bring her up as a girl. He could not. But Marjory took a different view of the situation, and before six months had passed it dawned upon the Doctor that, as often as not, she was trotting round with her doll in his shadow as he paced the garden, or sitting in a corner of his study intent on some game of her own. She was a singularly silent unobjectionable child at such times; at others, if he might judge from the sounds that reached him, quite the reverse. He laid down his pen to watch her as she sate in the sunshine by the window one day, and heard her instantly tell her doll, that if she was naughty and disturbed Dr. Carmichael she must be sent into the garden. Another day he came upon her in his chair poring over a Greek treatise in an attitude which even he recognised as a faithful copy of his own. Finally, he discovered that she had taught her doll to draw geometrical figures such as she often saw on the papers littered about the room. This palpable preference for him and his occupations being distinctly flattering, he began to take more notice of her, and try experiments with her memory. So, by degrees, becoming interested in her quick intelligence, he deliberately began to educate her, as he would have educated a boy, with a view to her making her own living in the future. As indeed she would have to do, in the event of his death; since years before her advent he had sunk all his private means in an annuity, and the expenses of his scientific work did not allow of his saving much. The prospect neither pleased nor displeased the girl. It came simply, naturally, to her, as it does to a boy. On the other hand, she certainly worked harder than any boy would have done, partly because she took it for granted that the tasks set her by Dr. Carmichael were very ordinary ones, and partly because of that feminine tolerance of mere drudgery which makes it so difficult to compare the intellectual work of a man and a woman.