A Little Rebel | Page 2

nurse! a girl of seventeen! She'll want to be going out
to balls and things--at her age."
As if smitten to the earth by this last awful idea, he picks his glasses out
of the sugar and goes back to the letter.
"You will find her the dearest girl. Most loving, and tender-hearted;
and full of life and spirits."
"Good heavens!" says the professor. He puts down the letter again, and
begins to pace the room. "'Life and spirits.' A sort of young kangaroo,
no doubt. What will the landlady say? I shall leave these rooms"--with
a fond and lingering gaze round the dingy old apartment that hasn't an
article in it worth ten sous--"and take a small house--somewhere--and ...
But--er----It won't be respectable, I think. I--I've heard things said
about--er--things like that. It's no good in looking an old fogey, if you
aren't one; it's no earthly use"--standing before a glass and ruefully
examining his countenance--"in looking fifty if you are only thirty-four.
It will be a scandal," says the professor mournfully. "They'll cut her,
and they'll cut me, and--what the deuce did Wynter mean by leaving
me his daughter? A real live girl of seventeen! It'll be the death of me,"
says the professor, mopping his brow. "What"----wrathfully----"that
determined spendthrift meant, by flinging his family on my shoulders,
I----Oh! Poor old Wynter!"
Here he grows remorseful again. Abuse a man dead and gone, and one,
too, who had been good to him in many ways when he, the professor,
was younger than he is now, and had just quarrelled with a father who
was always only too prone to quarrel with anyone who gave him the
chance seems but a poor thing. The professor's quarrel with his father
had been caused by the young man's refusal to accept a Government
appointment--obtained with some difficulty--for the very insufficient
and, as it seemed to his father, iniquitous reason, that he had made up
his mind to devote his life to science. Wynter, too, was a scientist of no
mean order, and would, probably, have made his mark in the world, if
the world and its pleasures had not made their mark on him. He had

been young Curzon's coach at one time, and finding the lad a kindred
spirit, had opened out to him his own large store of knowledge, and
steeped him in that great sea of which no man yet has drank
enough--for all begin, and leave it, athirst.
Poor Wynter! The professor, turning in his stride up and down the
narrow, uncomfortable room, one of the many that lie off the Strand,
finds his eyes resting on that other letter--carelessly opened, barely
begun.
From Wynter's solicitor! It seems ridiculous that Wynter should have
had a solicitor. With a sigh, he takes it up, opens it out and begins to
read it. At the end of the second page, he starts, re-reads a sentence or
two, and suddenly his face becomes illuminated. He throws up his head.
He cackles a bit. He looks as if he wants to say something very
badly--"Hurrah," probably--only he has forgotten how to do it, and
finally goes back to the letter again, and this time--the third
time--finishes it.
Yes. It is all right! Why on earth hadn't he read it first? So, the girl is to
be sent to live with her aunt after all--an old lady--maiden lady.
Evidently living somewhere in Bloomsbury. Miss Jane Majendie.
Mother's sister evidently. Wynter's sisters would never have been old
maids if they had resembled him, which probably they did--if he had
any. What a handsome fellow he was! and such a good-natured fellow
too.
The professor colors here in his queer sensitive way, and pushes his
spectacles up and down his nose, in another nervous fashion of his.
After all, it was only this minute he had been accusing old Wynter of
anything but good nature. Well! He had wronged him there. He glances
at the letter again.
He has only been appointed her guardian, it seems. Guardian of her
fortune, rather than of her.
The old aunt will have the charge of her body, the--er--pleasure of her
society--he, of the estate only.

Fancy Wynter, of all men, dying rich--actually rich. The professor pulls
his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre
apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific
world--and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far--has enabled him to
improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, and distinctly
outside the line of want, a thing to be grateful for, as his family having
in a measure abandoned him, he, on his part, had abandoned his family
in a measure also (and with reservations), and it would have been
impossible to him, of all men, to confess