muttered a line or two to himself. His companions took no
notice of these combinations of eating and learning: they
knew from experience that it was his way to make up at
breakfast-time for the moments he had stolen from his studies
the night before.

It was not difficult to see that the third member of the
party, a girl of nineteen or twenty, was the boy's sister.
Each had a wealth of brown hair, inclining, in the girl's case
to a shade that had tints of gold in it; each had grey eyes,
in which there was a mixture of blue; each had a bright, vivid
colour; each was undeniably good-looking and eminently
healthy. No one would have doubted that both had lived a good
deal of an open-air existence: the boy was already muscular
and sinewy: the girl looked as if she was well acquainted with
the tennis racket and the golf-stick. Nor would any one have
made the mistake of thinking that these two were blood
relations of the man at the head of the table--between them
and him there was not the least resemblance of feature, of
colour, or of manner.

While the boy learnt the last lines of his Latin, and the
doctor turned over the newspaper, the girl read a letter
--evidently, from the large sprawling handwriting, the missive
of some girlish correspondent. She was deep in it when, from
one of the turrets of the Cathedral, a bell began to ring. At
that, she glanced at her brother.

"There's Martin, Dick!" she said. "You'll have to hurry."