Your very aff.
S. L. J.-B.
Turk has put on mourning for Scamper,—crape round his left arm, as they do in the army. He evidently quite understands, for he doesn’t try to get it off....”
The reader will not need to be told that S. J.-B. went out on the tender to meet her friend at Liverpool,—“after awful rush previous day with Surgeons’ Hall, leader, etc.”
Dr. Sewall’s choice of a holiday, happily, was a quiet time, mainly in Perthshire; but, straight from Liverpool, the two fellow-workers went to Shipley to see Mrs. Unwin, whose health had been failing for some time.
The friendship between S. J.-B. and her fellow student had never flagged. S. J.-B. had paid repeated visits to the Yorkshire home, where husband and wife vied with each other in the warmth of their welcome, and where both had proved most loyal advocates and upholders of the new Cause. More than once when a petition was being got ready for Parliament on the subject of the medical education of women, Mrs. Unwin had proved herself a keen and successful canvasser for signatures in her neighbourhood, throwing into the scale that weight of personal popularity which is so important a factor in the achievement of any aim. She had even paid a visit to the beehive at 15 Buccleuch Place, to be made much of by the workers, and to be not a little impressed by the sight of such divers and strenuous activities.
And now she was ill, and S. J.-B. was perfectly sure that, if anyone could bring healing, it was “the little doctor.”
Fresh courage they brought indeed, a little fresh lease of life in which the sufferer recovered strength and proved a renewed source of comfort to husband and children before she was called hence out of their sight; but healing in this world was not to be. Dis aliter visum.
In other respects the holiday was a refreshing one. It included attendance at a meeting of the British Association—great joy for Dr. Sewall—and a stay at an old Perthshire farmhouse, which, to many other attractions in S. J.-B.’s eyes, added the crowning one of a ghost,—a ghost which was visible to the dogs, and abundantly audible to herself and Miss Du Pre, though it failed subsequently to make any impression on the representatives of the Society for Psychical Research.