men for whom I have no esteem, make my ears tingle and my cheek blush.
When I think of what Darrell has already done for me,--me who have no
claim on him,--it seems to me as if I must hate the man who insinuates,
'Fear lest your benefactor find a smile at his own hearth, a child of his
own blood; for you may be richer at his death in proportion as his life
is desolate.'"

VANCE.--"You are a fine young fellow, and I beg your pardon. Take care
of that milestone: thank you. But I suspect that at least two-thirds of
those friendly hands that detained you on the way to me were stretched
out less to Lionel Haughton, a subaltern in the Guards, than to Mr.
Darrell's heir presumptive."

LIONEL.--"That thought sometimes galls me, but it does me good; for it
goads on my desire to make myself some one whom the most worldly would
not disdain to know for his own sake. Oh for active service! Oh for a
sharp campaign! Oh for fair trial how far a man in earnest can grapple
Fortune to his breast with his own strong hands! You have done so,
Vance; you had but your genius and your painter's brush. I have no
genius; but I have a resolve, and resolve is perhaps as sure of its ends
as genius. Genius and Resolve have three grand elements in common,--
Patience, Hope, and Concentration."

Vance, more and more surprised, looked hard at Lionel without speaking.
Five years of that critical age, from seventeen to twenty-two, spent in
the great capital of Europe; kept from its more dangerous vices partly
by a proud sense of personal dignity, partly by a temperament which,
regarding love as an ideal for all tender and sublime emotion, recoiled
from low profligacy as being to love what the Yahoo of the mocking
satirist was to man; absorbed much by the brooding ambition that takes