Elsie withdrew her hand, and looked up surprised in his face, with one of those appeals which are so much less answerable than words. She stood a little aside while he began to expound his discovery. They had all caught a few of the most superficial scientific terms from Johnny. Elsie would never have spoken of the new thing being “figured” in a book, but for those little technicalities of knowledge which he shed about him. And he had said that she was the one of all his interested society who understood best. She was the only one who knew what observation meant, the naturalist said. I think that this was a mistake myself, and that he was chiefly led away by her sympathy and by certain other sentiments of which it is unnecessary to speak. In the meantime, he explained with a mingled gruffness and languor which Elsie did not understand. “Oh, it’s perhaps not so great a discovery after all,” Johnny said. “I daresay some fellow has noted it before. That’s what you always find when you take it into your head you have got something new.” “But you know all about the Medusæ,” said Elsie, “and you would be sure to know if it had been discovered before.” “I’m not sure that I know anything,” said Johnny, despondently. He cast the jelly fish out of his hand upon the sand. “We’re just, as Newton said, like bairns picking up shells on the shore. We know nothing. It is maybe no new thing at all, but just a variety that everybody knows.” “Oh, Johnny, that is not like you!” cried Elsie, while the two young men standing by, to whom this mood on Wemyss’s part was quite unknown, gaped at him, vaguely embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Rodie had a great desire to get away from a problem he could not understand, and Frank was feeling a little guilty, he could scarcely tell why. Elsie got down on her knees upon the sand, which was firm though wet, and, gathering a handful of the dulse with its great wet stalks and hollow berries, made a bed for the Medusæ, which, with some repugnance, she lifted on to the little heap. “You will have to give me a new pair of gloves,” she said, looking up with a laugh, “for I have spoilt these ones that are nearly new; and what will my mother say? But though you think it is very weak, I cannot touch a jelly fish--I am meaning a Medusa, which is certainly a far bonnier name--with my bare hands. There now, it will go easy into a basket, or I would almost carry it myself, with the dulse all about it; but to throw it away is what I will never consent to, for if you think it is a discovery, I know it must be a discovery, and it will be called after you, and a credit to us all.”