here is that underlying luxury of
woe, she commenced to rehearse the loving farewells she would take on
paper, and the harrowing last messages she would send to every member
of her family.

Occasionally May's hallucination took the form of conjuring up a series
of disasters which should suddenly descend on her absent friends. If she
did not die herself, one or all of those she loved might die while she
was separated from them. Her father might fall down in a fit; her mother
might be seized with small-pox or typhoid fever; and what more likely
than that Dora should catch the infection waiting on her mother?

This distempered frame of mind was hardly calculated for the rapid
reception and assimilation of these particles, terminations, and cases
of philological nicety in which May began to recognize that she was
inaccurate and deficient.

If Tray could but have come to her, and laid his shining black nose in
her lap, barked in her face, and invited her to take a turn in the
grounds of Thirlwall Hall, he would have ceased to be the doleful,
shadowy phantom of a Tray she was constantly seeing now, along with
other phantoms. A game of romps with her four-footed friend would have
done something to dissipate the mental sickness which was prostrating
May's powers. But Thirlwall Hall was moulded on the men's colleges, and
there were no dogs for the girl any more than for the boy graduates.

Miss Lascelles was at once conscientious and kind, with considerable
natural sagacity; but she led a busy, rather over-burdened life, and had
little time to spare. Naturally she was tempted, in spite of the logical
faculty which made her a capital principal of Thirlwall Hall, to leap at
conclusions like many of her weaker-minded sisters. She had taken it for
granted that Miss Millar was simply a spoilt child, without more ability
and information than had just served her to surmount the preliminary
test of admission to Thirlwall Hall, where, nevertheless, she had no
business to be. Her time would be completely wasted; she would only be
wretched, and serve to make other people uncomfortable. However, as she
had stood the preliminary test, and was at Thirlwall Hall for the rest
of the term, the most humane thing to do was to set some other girl who
was not particularly engaged on her own account, who could be safely
trusted with such a charge, who had plenty of acquaintances at St.
Ambrose's to render the charge lighter, to make friends with t