Charles Osmond laughed. “Very well then, you have a wide field. From Carlyle to Miss Bird, and from Ernst Haeckel to Charles Reade. I should make them into a big sandwich if I were you.” He said goodbye, and left Erica still on the hearth rug, her face brighter than it had been for months. “I like that man,” she said to herself. “He's honest and thorough, and good all through. Yet how in the world does he make himself believe in his creed? Goodness, Christlikeness. He looked so grand, too, as he said that. It is wonderful what a personal sort of devotion those three have for their ideal.” She wandered away to recollections of Thekla Sonnenthal, and that carried her back to the time of their last parting, and the recollection of her sorrow. All at once the loneliness of the present was borne in upon her overwhelmingly; she looked around the little room, the Ilkley couch was pushed away into a corner, there was a pile of newspapers upon it. A great sob escaped her. For a minute she pressed her hands tightly together over her eyes, then she hurriedly opened a book on “Electricity,” and began to read as if for her life. She was roused in about an hour's time by a laughing exclamation. She started, and looking up, saw her cousin Tom. “Talk about absorption, and brown studies!” he cried, “why, you eat everything I ever saw. I've been looking at you for at least three minutes.” Tom was now about nineteen; he had inherited the auburn coloring of the Raeburns, but otherwise he was said to be much more like the Craigies. He was nice looking, but somewhat freckled, and though he was tall and strongly built, he somehow betrayed that he had led a sedentary life and looked, in fact, as if he wanted a training in gymnastics. For the rest he was shrewd, business-like, good-natured, and at present very conceited. He had been Erica's friend and playfellow as long as she could remember; they were brother and sister in all but the name, for they had lived within a stone's throw of each other all their lives, and now shared the same house. “I never heard you come in,” she said, smiling a little. “You must have been very quiet.” “I don't believe you'd hear a salute fired in the next room if you were reading, you little book worm! But look here; I've got a parody on the chieftain that'll make you cry with laughing. You remember the smashed windows at the meeting at Rilchester last week?” Erica remembered well enough, she had felt sore and angry about it, and the comments in the newspapers had not been consolatory. She had learned to dread even the comic papers; but there was nothing spiteful in the one which Tom produced that evening. It was headed: Scotch song (Tune--“Twas within a mile of Edinboro'town”)