a piece of foolish nonsense
such as girls are apt to take into their heads about their companions.
If there was anything in it, and she had not been going away, her
father ought to have been warned, and Cyril Carey spoken to in the way
he deserved--selfish scapegrace! As it is, the bare suspicion is enough
to reconcile one to Fanny Russell's going out to India, though that
custom for girls has fallen into disrepute, and I never had any liking
for it. Still I hope that Fanny will soon make an excellent marriage,
and will learn to laugh at Cyril Carey and his unwarrantable
presumption, together with any girlish folly of which she may have been
guilty."

Mrs. Millar spoke in another fashion to the little Doctor. She had
happened to be at the railway station on the raw, chill morning when
Fanny Russell, in her smart new gray travelling suit--part of her
outfit--was put into a railway carriage by her father and left there
alone, while he went to look after the luggage and find a
smoking-carriage for himself.

Fanny sat like a statue. She did not even raise her veil when she was
bidding farewell to Lucy Hewett and Dora, who were seeing her off--not
to take a last look at Redcross, where she had spent her youth.

Mrs. Millar understood it better when she stumbled against Cyril Carey
half hidden by a lamp-post, watching the vanishing train. She might have
taken the opportunity to rebuke him for his unprincipled recklessness;
instead of doing so--after one glance at the young fellow's haggard
face--the ordinary words of greeting died away on the kind woman's lips.
She turned aside in another direction, making as if she had not seen
him, without breathing a word of the encounter until she had her
husband's ear all to herself in the privacy of the dining-room.

"O Jonathan!" she said, "I am so glad, so thankful that you did not
interfere and use any influence, any pressure on Dora about Tom
Robinson. I think it would have broken my heart to see any daughter of
mine going off as Fanny Russell went to-day, leaving the look I declare
I beheld on that poor lad's face. I should not wonder though she has
given him the last push on the road to destruction."

"Oh, come now; it is not so bad as that," protested Dr. Millar, and then
he was guilty of a most audacious paraphrase of a piece of schoolboy
slang, for which he had some excuse in the habits of his wife--"Keep
your cap on, Maria. In the first place, I see no analogy between the