pularity was not entirely owing to his skill, although he had an
exceedingly good repute among his brethren in medicine. Neither was it
attributable to good looks. He owed it rather to a sympathetic manner,
to the cheerful candor of his dark grey eyes, to the mixture of firmness
and delicate kindness by which his treatment of his patients was
characterized. He was especially successful in his dealings with
children; and he had therefore a good deal of adoration from grateful
mothers to put up with. But of his skill and intellectual power there
could be no doubt; and these qualities, coupled with his winning manner,
bade fair to raise him to a very high place in his profession.

There was one little check, and one only, to the flow of Mr. Kenyon's
prosperity. Careful mothers occasionally objected that he was not
married, and that his sister was an actress. Why did he let his sister
go on the stage? And why, if she was an actress, did he allow her to
live in his house? It did not seem quite respectable in the eyes of some
worthy people that these things should be. But Mr. Kenyon only laughed
when reports of these sayings, reached him, and went on his way unmoved,
as his sister Ethel went on hers. And in London, the question of a
doctor's relations, his sisters, his cousins, his aunts, and what they
do for a living, is not so important as it is in the country. Maurice
Kenyon's care of his sister, and her devotion to him, were well known by
all their friends; and as he sometimes said, it mattered very little to
him what all the rest of the world might think.

"Talking of your sister, Kenyon," said Mr. Brooke, somewhat abruptly, "I
suppose you know that my daughter comes to me to-morrow?"

The connection of ideas was not, perhaps, very obvious, but Maurice
Kenyon nodded as if he understood.

"I suppose she will want a companion. Would Ethel be so kind as to call
on her?"

"Certainly. She will do all she can for Miss Brooke, I am sure."

"I have been speaking to Mrs. Romaine, too."

"_Have_ you?" Kenyon raised eyebrows a very little, but Mr. Brooke did
not seem to notice the change of expression.

"--And she promises to do what she can; but a woman like Mrs. Romaine is
not likely to find many subjects in common with a girl fresh from a
convent."

"I suppose not"--in the driest of tones.

"Mrs. Romaine," said Brooke, in a more decided tone, "is a cultivated
woman who has made a mark in literature----"

"In literat