CHAPTER XX.

While Leonard Fairfield had been obscurely wrestling against poverty,
neglect, hunger, and dread temptation, bright had been the opening day
and smooth the upward path of Randal Leslie. Certainly no young man,
able and ambitious, could enter life under fairer auspices; the
connection and avowed favourite of a popular and energetic statesman,
the brilliant writer of a political work that had lifted him at once into
a station of his own, received and courted in those highest circles, to
which neither rank nor fortune alone suffices for a familiar passport,
--the circles above fashion itself. the circles of POWER,--with every
facility of augmenting information, and learning the world betimes
through the talk of its acknowledged masters,--Randal had but to move
straight onward, and success was sure. But his tortuous spirit
delighted in scheme and intrigue for their own sake. In scheme and
intrigue he saw shorter paths to fortune, if not to fame.

His besetting sin was also his besetting weakness. He did not aspire,--
he coveted. Though in a far higher social position than Frank Hazeldean,
despite the worldly prospects of his old schoolfellow, he coveted the
very things that kept Frank Hazeldean below him,--coveted his idle
gayeties, his careless pleasures, his very waste of youth. Thus, also,
Randal less aspired to Audley Egerton's repute than he coveted Audley
Egerton's wealth and pomp, his princely expenditure, and his Castle
Rackrent in Grosvenor Square. It was the misfortune of his birth to be
so near to both these fortunes,--near to that of Leslie, as the future
head of that fallen House; near even to that of Hazeldean, since, as we
have seen before, if the squire had had no son, Randal's descent from the