He was to send me books and maps and papers for my 'History of Thibet and the Wanderings of the Ten Tribes.'" With a confused negation the girl had fled away to the cheerless shelter of the great rooms whose drab and gray arrangements bespoke the Reformatory or a Refuge for the Friendless.
And the stern old scholar waited for the fluttering bird whom adverse Fate had driven into his dismal lair with all the pompous severity of a guardian and trustee.
Seated at a long desk littered with a multitude of papers, Professor Andrew Fraser coldly bowed the two women to convenient seats.

The parvenu banker who had fled away after a bankruptcy due to the erection and embellishment of "The Folly," had approved a semi-medieval plan of construction which suggested a Norman stronghold or a Corsican mansion arranged for a stubborn defense.

Books, globes, maps, and papers littered the floors, and were piled nearby in convenient heaps with tell-tale flying signals of copious note taking.

It was a bristling Redoubt of Learning.
But on this sunny morning the retired Professor of Edinburg University held sundry letters, dispatches, and legal papers clutched in his claw-like hands.

His eye rested upon Justine Delande, in a semi-hostile glare, as he slowly said: "I've sent for ye, as in the place of your father's daughter, ye must know of the changes that come to us, with the chances of Life and the sair ways o' the world." He was nervously fumbling with a selection of the papers and he paused and coughed ominously.