ws, and swinging her eye-glasses backwards and
forwards with a nervous gesture which was peculiar to her.

Suddenly she gave a sharp, satisfied jerk of the head, and began to
pour out the coffee. From outside there came the dull thudding sound
of heavy feet upon thick carpet. The door swung open, and the
Professor entered with a quick, nervous step. He nodded to his sister,
and seating himself at the other side of the table, began to open the
small pile of letters which lay beside his plate.

Professor Ainslie Grey was at that time forty-three years of
age--nearly twelve years older than his sister. His career had been a
brilliant one. At Edinburgh, at Cambridge, and at Vienna he had laid
the foundations of his great reputation, both in physiology and in
zoology.

His pamphlet, On the Mesoblastic Origin of Excitomotor Nerve Roots, had
won him his fellowship of the Royal Society; and his researches, Upon
the Nature of Bathybius, with some Remarks upon Lithococci, had been
translated into at least three European languages. He had been
referred to by one of the greatest living authorities as being the very
type and embodiment of all that was best in modern science. No wonder,
then, that when the commercial city of Birchespool decided to create a
medical school, they were only too glad to confer the chair of
physiology upon Mr. Ainslie Grey. They valued him the more from the
conviction that their class was only one step in his upward journey,
and that the first vacancy would remove him to some more illustrious
seat of learning.

In person he was not unlike his sister. The same eyes, the same
contour, the same intellectual forehead. His lips, however, were
firmer, and his long, thin, lower jaw was sharper and more decided. He
ran his finger and thumb down it from time to time, as he glanced over
his letters.

"Those maids are very noisy," he remarked, as a clack of tongues
sounded in the distance.

"It is Sarah," said his sister; "I shall speak about it."

She had handed over his coffee-cup, and was sipping at her own,
glancing furtively through her narrowed lids at the austere face of her
brother.

"The first great advance of the human race," said the Professor, "was
when, by the development of their left frontal convolutions, they
attained the power of speech. Their second advance was when they
learned to control that power. Woman has not yet attained the second
stage."

He half closed his eyes as