His Excellency's English Governess

It was Presentation-day at the University of London. The date was somewhere in the latter half of the present century,—not this year, nor last year, nor the year before that, when you, dear reader, or your brother or cousin, may have graced the scene in cap and gown—but so long ago that the graduates and undergraduates of to-day were still in the nursery taking practical lessons as to the value of tactual perception, or forcing an undesired entrance into the realms of knowledge by way of the spelling-book and the Latin Primer. The day was a lovely one in May, and the spring sunshine poured in through the high windows of the theatre on the Chancellor in his Court suit and gold-embroidered gown, on the members of the Senate in their crimson and scarlet robes, and on the reporters scribbling away for dear life at their table. There was the usual throng of admiring friends and relations in the gallery and the back seats, and the usual inner semicircle of presentees, looking like a bed of gorgeous and not always harmonious flowers, from the vivid colours of their gowns and hoods. A modern observer would have noted only one point of marked difference from a similar scene to-day, and this was the absence of the serried ranks of lady graduates. There were only two or three women to be presented, and they looked pale and nervous, but dauntlessly resolved to do their duty to the end. In those days it was an achievement to gain possession of a London degree, and these girls felt that the eyes of England and of the world were upon them. They were conscious also of furnishing the sensation of the day, for a woman had obtained the prize for French in the B.A. Final, and the second place in Honours for Mental and Moral Science, for the first time on record, and the friends of female education were jubilant. Miss Arbuthnot, the principal of the South Central High School, in which Cecil Anstruther had received her education, looked fully two inches taller than usual as she led her pupil up to the Chancellor’s dais, and the little knot of friends and teachers in the gallery applauded frantically, while even the men who had been ignominiously left behind in the race were magnanimous enough to do their share of clapping. The parliamentary representative of the University referred especially to Miss Anstruther in his regulation speech, and the noble Chancellor himself pressed her hand and congratulated her with even more than his ordinary paternal suavity of manner. As for Cecil’s own feelings, she was so much embarrassed by the cheering, the publicity, and the difficulty of carrying her cap, her diploma, and her prize, and finding a hand to give the Chancellor at the same time, that she did not breathe freely until she was safely back in her seat, with her companions in misfortune eagerly inspecting her new possessions.