Some one, a wealthy member of his extensive family, found out that this Cuthbert was no common youth, and that with a little encouragement he might do honour to the clan. This distant kinsman, one of the heads of the great house of Ramsay, sent him to Cambridge; where he entered as a scholar of his college, and at the end of a year gained a University scholarship, which made him independent. This hardy youth from the city of Bon Accord was able to live upon so little—could not for the life of him have been extravagant, having none of that _mollesse_, or soft self-indulgence, which is at the root of most men’s squanderings. He was nine and twenty years of age, and he had never worn a gardenia, and had only had one suit of dress clothes since he grew to man’s estate. Needless to say that albeit he went out very seldom that suit was now somewhat shabby; but Cuthbert’s superb appearance neutralized the shabbiness, and he looked the finest man in any assembly. His parents were in their graves before he left the University. He had no ties. He was free as Adam would have been if Eve had never been created. There was no one near or dear to him to feel proud of his honours, though his name was high in the list of Wranglers, and he had taken a first-class in science. And now, after that interval of serious scientific work in Leipsic and Paris, he was plodding at St. Thomas’s with a view to a London degree, and thus the two hard-working young men—very intimate in the old days when Cuthbert’s rooms in the Bishop’s Hostel were conveniently adjacent to Theodore’s ground floor in Trinity Hall—were thrown together again upon their life-journey, and were honestly glad to renew the old friendship. Ramsay was delighted with his friend’s chambers. “I was afraid there was nothing so good as this left in the Temple,” he said, rapturously contemplating the blackened old wainscot, and the low ceiling with its heavy cross-beam. “I thought smartness and brand-new stone had superseded all that was historical and interesting within the precincts of the Lamb. But these rooms of yours have the true smack. Why, I really believe now, Dalbrook, you must have rats behind that wainscot?” “Perhaps I had, till Miss Nipper came to keep me company,” answered Theodore, patting the terrier, whose neat little head and intelligent ears were lifted at the sound of her name. “And Nipper has made them emigrate to the next house, no doubt?” “I’m glad you like my rooms, Cuthbert.” “Like them! I envy you the ownership more than I can say. If anything can make me sorry that I am not a lawyer it would be the fact that I can’t live in the Temple. We doctors have no distinctive abode, nothing associated with the past.” “Perhaps that is because medicine is essentially a progressive science.” “Is it? Sometimes I begin to doubt if it has made any progress since Galen—or Albertus Magnus. I will admit that there was progress of some kind up to _his_ time.”