feared at one moment. If only Miss Kate Ironside is not too much
of a dumb belle and a mere school-girl," reflected Rose, with the
supercilious consciousness of maturity in a girl who had been more than
a year away from all teaching except what she had herself practised, and
what she received as a grown-up woman at Mr. St. Foy's. "I wonder if Dr.
Harry Ironside will have spoken of our encounter, and what came of it,
to Annie before I can tell her. I should like to see her face when she
learns that I know somebody who goes to St. Ebbe's," ended Rose, with
persistent audacity.

Annie's face was a study when she heard of it. Rose had been guilty of a
little wilful self-deception, still she received a shock.

The first time the sisters were able to meet and have a walk together,
after Rose's encounter with Dr. Ironside, Rose broached the great piece
of news, and witnessed the effect it produced. The girls had managed to
reach the Marble Arch into Hyde Park, beyond which they found a seat for
a few minutes. It was not too early in the season for them to take
possession of it, and they were still sufficiently strangers in London
to suppose that seats were placed for the accommodation of the weary of
all ranks and both sexes, and not merely for the benefit of nurse-maids
and their charges, or of able-bodied tramps. The sisters prepared to
talk over their own concerns and Redcross with the _empressement_ of
girls, to forget all about the moving crowd around them, and the
grinding of that great mill of London in the traffic that is never for
an instant still.

"Oh! Annie, have you seen him lately?" began Rose--"Dr. Harry Ironside,
I mean. Has he told you that he and his sister are coming to board at
Mrs. Jennings's?"

"Seen him! Dr. Harry Ironside! What do you know about Dr. Harry
Ironside? What are you saying, Rose?" cried Annie, sitting bolt upright,
opening wide her dark eyes, and fixing them in the most amazed,
displeased, discomfiting gaze on Rose. The rate at which the two had
been walking and talking, the suspicion of east wind, the premature heat
of the May sun, had converted the soft red in Annie's cheeks to a
brilliant scarlet.

"What I am saying," answered Rose, nodding gaily, and trying hard not to
flinch under the trying reception of her precious piece of information,
"is that, by the funniest chance, I made the acquaintance of a friend of
yours at St. Ebbe's. And the laughable coincidence of our meeting and