"Oh! Then you have studied botany! But they did not teach you there to spot Thlaspi arvense?"
"No; I taught myself that before I began to study botany. I think it is a pity that that part of the subject is so much ignored."
"But botany, as taught at present, is much more scientific. Old-fashioned botany—especially as taught to ladies—was a happy combination of pedestrianism and glorified stamp-collecting."
"True," said Mona, "and if one had to choose between the old and the new, one would choose the new without a moment's hesitation; but, on the other hand, it does give the enemy occasion to blaspheme, when a man can tell them that a flower is composite, proterandrous, syngenesious, &c., but when he is quite unable to designate it by its simple name of dandelion."
Both the men laughed.
When they reached Kilwinnie, the elder of the two stopped and held out his hand.
"I am sorry we cannot offer to see you home," he said; "but the fact is, dinner is waiting for me now at the inn, and I start for London to-night. If you are ever in town again, my wife and I will be only too pleased to see you," and he handed her his card.
He did not ask her name, for the simple reason that he had already seen it in the beginning of her Flora.
When Mona looked at the card, she found that she had been spending the afternoon with a scientist of European celebrity.
"If redbeard be that," she said, "what must blackbeard be, and why did he not give me his card too?"