a model of your own. Village full of them; you
could bargain with a porpoise for half the money which I was duped into
squandering away on a chit! But don't look so grave; you may copy me if
you can!"

"Time to start, and must walk brisk, sir," said the jolly landlord,
looking in.

"Good-by, good-by."

And so departed Lionel Haughton upon an emprise as momentous to that
youth-errant as Perilous Bridge or Dragon's Cave could have been to
knight-errant of old.

"Before we decide on having done with each other, a short visit,"--so
ran the challenge from him who had everything to give unto him who
had everything to gain. And how did Lionel Haughton, the ambitious
and aspiring, contemplate the venture in which success would admit him
within the gates of the golden Carduel an equal in the lists with the
sons of paladins, or throw him back to the arms of the widow who let a
first floor in the back streets of Pimlico? Truth to say, as he strode
musingly towards the station for starting, where the smoke-cloud now
curled from the wheel-track of iron, truth to say, the anxious doubt
which disturbed him was not that which his friends might have felt on
his behalf. In words, it would have shaped itself thus,--"Where is
that poor little Sophy! and what will become of her--what?" But when,
launched on the journey, hurried on to its goal, the thought of the
ordeal before him forced itself on his mind, he muttered inly to
himself, "Done with each other; let it be as he pleases, so that I
do not fawn on his pleasure. Better a million times enter life as a
penniless gentleman, who must work his way up like a man, than as one
who creeps on his knees into fortune, shaming birthright of gentleman or
soiling honour of man." Therefore taking into account the poor cousin's
vigilant pride on the _qui vive_ for offence, and the rich cousin's
temper (as judged by his letters) rude enough to resent it, we must own
that if Lionel Haughton has at this moment what is commonly called "a
chance," the question as yet is not, What is that chance? but, What
will he do with it? And as the reader advances in this history, he will
acknowledge that there are few questions in this world so frequently
agitated, to which the solution is more important to each puzzled mortal
than that upon which starts every sage's discovery, every novelist's
plot,--that which applies to MAN'S LIFE, from its first sleep in the
cradle, "WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT?"

BOOK