JOHN LOVELL & SON,
23 ST. NICHOLAS STREET.
Entered according to Act of Parliament in the year 1891, by John
Lovell & Son, in the office of the Minister of Agriculture and
Statistics at Ottawa.
A LITTLE REBEL.
CHAPTER I.
"Perplex'd in the extreme."
"The memory of past favors is like a rainbow, bright, vivid and beautiful."
The professor, sitting before his untasted breakfast, is looking the very picture of dismay. Two letters lie before him; one is in his hand, the other is on the table-cloth. Both are open; but of one, the opening lines—that tell of the death of his old friend—are all he has read; whereas he has read the other from start to finish, already three times. It is from the old friend himself, written a week before his death, and very urgent and very pleading. The professor has mastered its contents with ever-increasing consternation.
Indeed so great a revolution has it created in his mind, that his face—(the index of that excellent part of him)—has, for the moment, undergone a complete change. Any ordinary acquaintance now entering the professor's rooms (and those acquaintances might be whittled down to quite a little few), would hardly have known him. For the abstraction that, as a rule, characterizes his features—the way he has of looking at you, as if he doesn't see you, that harasses the simple, and enrages the others—is all gone! Not a trace of it remains. It has given place to terror, open and unrestrained.
"A girl!" murmurs he in a feeble tone, falling back in his chair. And then again, in a louder tone of dismay—"A girl!" He pauses again, and now again gives way to the fear that is destroying him—"A grown girl!"