For while you can safely assume that an undergraduate has not worked more than so many hours or minutes a day, it is quite possible that a girl student may have sate up half the night over a trivial exercise. The primal curse on labour, it must be remembered, was not extended to the woman, who had a peculiar ban of her own. So, by the time she was seventeen, Marjory Carmichael was learned beyond her years in Greek and Latin, and displayed a genius for mathematics which fairly surprised her uncle. Then he died suddenly, leaving her to the guardianship of a distant relation and ardent disciple in Edinburgh, who was instructed to spend what small sum might remain, after paying just debts, on completing the girl's education, and starting her, not before the age of twenty-one, in a career; preferably teaching, which he considered the most suitable opening for her. She was strong, he said, in the letter in which he informed Dr. Kennedy of his wishes, and singularly sensible for a girl, despite a distressing want of proportion in her estimate of things. Being neither sentimental nor sensitive, she was not likely to give trouble. So far good, but at the very end of the letter came a remark showing that the old man was not quite the fossil he pretended to be. It ran thus: "All this concerns her head only; of her heart I know nothing. Let us hope she has none; for it is a terrible drawback to a woman who has brains. Anyhow, it has had no education from me." The description somehow did not prepare Dr. Tom Kennedy for either the face or manner which greeted him on his arrival at the house of mourning, but then he himself had the softest heart in the world, and the mere sight of a lonely slip of a thing in a black dress gave him a pang. But that was only for a moment; five minutes afterwards he wondered how that suggestion of kissing and comforting her in semi-fatherly fashion could have arisen. Yet the same evening after she had bidden him good-night with a little stilted hope that he would be comfortable, the temptation returned with redoubled force, when, on going into the study for another volume of the book he had taken up to his bedroom to read, he found her fast asleep in the dead man's chair, her arms flung out over the table, her cheek resting on one of the ponderous volumes which had been the dead man's real companions. Her fresh young face looked happy enough in its sleep, though the marks of tears were still visible, and yet Dr. Kennedy felt another pang. Had the child no better confidante than that musty, fusty old book? Yet he did not dare to rouse her, even though the room struck cold and dreary, for he felt that the knowledge that he had so far been witness of her weakness would be an offence, a barrier between them, and that was the last thing he desired. So he crept out of the room again discreetly, and smoked another cigar over the not uninteresting novelty of his guardianship. For Tom Kennedy was sentimental, and gloried in the fact.