ed one of the old hard experiences of my boyhood. The girl
herself is harmless enough, no doubt."

"And the rose?"

"The rose? Why, we have no time to waste in such talk as this. You
have not yet told me how you managed to get your profession. When I
last saw you you had set all the old professors in the university at
defiance. Did you carry lectures and cliniques by strategy or assault?
You have good fighting qualities, Maria."

She would rather not have gone over her battle with the doctors just
then: she would rather he had talked of her "magnetic instincts," her
hair, her eyes--anything else than her fighting qualities. But she
told him. There was an inexplicable delight to her in telling him
anything--even the time of day. Was he not a pioneer, a captain among
men, a seer in the realms of thought, keeping step with her in all her
high imaginings? Ordinary people, it is true, set McCall down as an
ordinary fellow, genial and hearty--not a very skillful physician,
perhaps, but a shrewd farmer, and the best judge of mules or peaches
in Kent county. Maria, however, saw him with the soul's eye.

Kitty meanwhile sat by the window mending the clothes that had come
out of the wash. Mr. Muller was reading some letters relative to the
school to her. This was the day of the week on which she always mended
the clothes, and Mr. Muller had fallen into the habit of reading to
her while she did so. But to-day the Reformatory rose before her a
prison, the gates of which were about to close on her. The heap of
stockings, the touch of the darning cotton, the sound of Mr. Muller's
droning voice, were maddening to her: every moment she made a tangle
in her thread, looking down at Maria under the Bourbon rose, and the
attentive face bent over her. Where should she go? What should she do?
Had the world nothing in it for her but this? Yesterday she had made
up her mind to go to Delaware to find Hugh Guinness, alive or dead,
and bring him to his father. That would be work worth doing. This
morning she remembered that Delaware was a wide hunting-ground--that
she had never been ten miles from home in her life. If there were
anybody to give her advice! This Doctor McCall had seemed to her
to-day as, in fact, he did to most people, practical, honest, full
of information. He would too, she somehow felt, understand her wild
fancy. But--

"Why should Doctor McCall dislike _me_?" she broke in at the close of
one of Mr. Muller's expositions.