the white clouds in the July sky, white, though nothing else is so in
Glasgow, where the air is heavy with perpetual smoke and vapour.

That girl, too broad-browed and large-eyed for mere youthful beauty, but
with such an arch, delicate, girlish mouth and chin as betokened her a
frank, unsophisticated, merry child after all, was Leslie Bower, the
young daughter and only child of an erudite and venerated professor.

Leslie had no brothers and no sisters, and in a sense she had neither
father nor mother, for Professor Bower was the son, husband, and father
of his books, and he had so mighty a family of these, ancient and
modern, that he had very little time or attention to spare for ties of
the flesh. He was a mild, absent, engrossed old man, flashing into
energy and genius in his own field of learning, but in the world of
ordinary humanity a body without a soul.

Professor Bower married late in life a timid, shrinking English wife,
who, removed from all early ties, and never mingling in Glasgow society,
lapsed into a stillness as profound as his own.

Dr. Bower took little notice of his child; what with duties and studies,
he had no leisure; he read in his slippered morning gown, he read at
meals, he read by his evening lamp; probably, if Mrs. Bower would have
confessed it, he kept a volume under his pillow. No wonder he was a
blear-eyed, poking, muttering old man, for he was much more interested
in Hannibal than in Bonaparte, and regarded Leslie, like the house, the
yearly income, the rector, the students, the janitors, as one of many
abstract facts with which he troubled himself as little as possible.

Mrs. Bower cared for Leslie's health and comfort with scrupulous nervous
exactness, but she was incapable of any other demonstration of regard.
She was as shy and egotistical as poor Louis XVI., and perhaps it would
have demanded as tragic a domestic revolution to have stirred her up to
lively tenderness. Leslie might have been as dubious as Marie Antoinette
of the amount of love entertained for her by her nearest kin, but
curiously, though affectionate and passionate enough to have been the
pure and innocent child of some fiery Jocobin, she had not vexed herself
about this mystery. One sees every day lush purple and rose-flowered
plants growing in unaccountable shade; true, their associates are pale
and drooping, and the growth of the hardier is treacherous, and may
distil poison, but the evil principle is gradual,