No one would have doubted that both had lived a good deal of an open-air existence: the boy was already muscular and sinewy: the girl looked as if she was well acquainted with the tennis racket and the golf-stick.

Nor would any one have made the mistake of thinking that these two were blood relations of the man at the head of the table--between them and him there was not the least resemblance of feature, of colour, or of manner.
While the boy learnt the last lines of his Latin, and the doctor turned over the newspaper, the girl read a letter--evidently, from the large sprawling handwriting, the missive of some girlish correspondent.

She was deep in it when, from one of the turrets of the Cathedral, a bell began to ring.

At that, she glanced at her brother.
"There's Martin, Dick!" she said.

"You'll have to hurry." Many a long year before that, in one of the bygone centuries, a worthy citizen of Wrychester, Martin by name, had left a sum of money to the Dean and Chapter of the Cathedral on condition that as long as ever the Cathedral stood, they should cause to be rung a bell from its smaller bell-tower for three minutes before nine o'clock every morning, all the year round.