her own age, as she
stood, with a fantastic little giggle, calling his attention, on the
threshold of his door.

Behind Lady Mariamne was a very different figure--that of the serious
and independent girl without any illusions, who is in so many cases the
child of such a mother, and who is in revolt so complete from all that
mother's traditions, so highly set on the crown of every opposite
principle, that nature vindicates itself by the possibility that she
may at any moment topple over and become again what her mother was. He
would have been a bold man, however, who in the present stage would
have prophesied any such fate for Dolly Prestwich, who between working
at Whitechapel, attending on a ward in St. Thomas's, drawing three
days a week in the Slade School, and other labours of equally varied
descriptions, had her time very fully taken up, and only on special
occasions had time to accompany her mother. She had been beguiled on
this occasion by the family history which was concerned, and which, _fin
de siecle_ as Dolly was, excited her curiosity almost as much as if she
had been born in the "forties." Dolly was never unkind, sometimes indeed
was quite the reverse, to her mother. When Mr. Tatham, with a man's
brutal unconsciousness of what is desirable, placed a chair for Lady
Mariamne in front of the fire, Dolly twisted it round with a dexterous
movement so as to shield the countenance which was not adapted for any
such illumination. For herself, Dolly cared nothing, whether it was the
noonday sun or the blaze of a furnace that shone upon her; she defied
them both to make her wink. As for complexion, she scorned that
old-fashioned vanity. She had not very much, it is true. Having been
scorched red and brown in Alpine expeditions in the autumn, she was now
of a somewhat dry whitish-greyish hue, the result of much loss of
cuticle and constant encounter with London fogs and smoke. She carried
Toto--who was a shrinking, chilly Italian greyhound--in a coat,
carelessly under one arm, and sat down beside her mother, studying the
papers on John's table with exceedingly curious eyes. She would have
liked to go over all his notes about his case, and form her own opinion
on it--which she would have done, we may be sure, much more rapidly, and
with more decision, than Mr. Tatham could do.

"So here I am again, you will say," said Lady Mariamne. She had taken
off her gloves, and was smoothing her hands, from the points of the
f