CHAPTER LIV.
PRESENTATION DAY.
The eventful day dawned at last, clear and bright, with a summer sky and a fresh spring breeze.
"One would think I was a bride at the very least," Mona said, laughing, when Lucy and Evelyn came in to help her to dress.
"If you think we would take this amount of trouble for a common or garden bride," said Lucy loftily, "you are profoundly mistaken. Bride, indeed!"
Sir Douglas had insisted on giving Mona an undergraduate's gown, heavy and handsome as it could be made; and the sight of her in that, and in a most becoming trencher, did more to reconcile him to her study of medicine than any amount of argument could have done.
"Distinctly striking!" was Mona's comment, when Lucy and Evelyn stopped dancing round her, and allowed her to see herself in the pier-glass. And she was perfectly right. Never in all her bright young life had she looked so charming as she did that Presentation Day.
"You will go to the function to day, Ralph?" said Melville to his friend the same morning.
"Not I! God bless my soul! when a man has graduated at Edinburgh and Cambridge, he can afford to dispense with a twopenny-halfpenny function at Burlington House."
"I thought you admitted that, even in comparison with Cambridge and Edinburgh, London had its points?"