the nurses hastened to explain that the stranger
came with old Mrs. Bexley and was going away again directly.

The doctor nodded, and went straight up to the child's bed. Lady Alice,
raising herself after careful arrangement of some wooden animals on the
sick child's table, came face to face with a very handsome man of about
thirty, who seemed to be regarding her with especial interest. He moved
away with a slight bow when she looked back at him, but he did not go
far. He paused to chat with another little patient, and Lady Alice
noticed that all the small faces brightened at the sight of him, and
that two or three children called him imperiously to their bedsides.
Something about him vaguely interested her--perhaps it was only his
pleasant look, perhaps the affection with which he was regarded, perhaps
the expression which his face had worn when he looked at her. She
remembered him so well that she was able when she paid a second visit to
the hospital to describe him to one of the Sisters, and ask his name.

"Kenyon," she repeated, when it was told to her. "I suppose it is not an
uncommon name?"

Lesley had spoken of a Mr. Kenyon. It was not this Mr. Kenyon, of
course!

But it _was_ "this Mr. Kenyon;" and thus Maurice met the mother of the
girl he loved in the ward of a London hospital, whither Lady Alice had
been urged by that impulse towards "The Unexplored," of which her
husband was the author. And in another ward of the same hospital lay a
patient whose destiny was to influence the fates of both--an insensible
man, whose name was unknown to the nurses, but whom Oliver would have
recognized as his brother, Francis Trent.

CHAPTER XXI.

ETHEL REMONSTRATES.

The house in which the Kenyons resided was built on the same pattern as
Mr. Brooke's, but it was in some respects very unlike Mr. Brooke's place
of residence. Maurice's consulting-room and dining-room corresponded,
perhaps, to Mr. Brooke's dining-room and study: it was upstairs where
the difference showed itself. Ethel's drawing-room was like herself--a
little whimsical, a little bizarre; pretty, withal, and original, and
somewhat unlike anything one had ever seen before. She was fond of
novelties, and introduced the latest fashions in draperies or china or
screens as soon as she could get hold of them; and the result was
occasionally incongruous, though always bright and cheerful-looking.

It was the incongruity of the ornaments and arrangements