When things have happened to a man which make him feel as if the sun had fallen out of the heavens, and the stars changed their courses, he is, no doubt, a little apt to feel astounded on finding, after a time, that it was not the sun nor the stars, but himself who was disturbed and jolted out of his old orbit into a new one. But let him be astonished as much as he will—let him even be indignant, as he very often is, at such vagaries of the universe so distressing him—he cannot alter things. The sun goes on shining, and the stars pursue their appointed march, and by and by he—to descend from great things to small ones—also falls into some sort of progress, be it march, or shamble, or shuffle, or steady struggle onwards and upwards. This always happens if the man be a very man, and not an amorphous sort of thing without backbone or sinew. In obedience to this law it had come to pass that Michael Langstroth, five years after he had been stricken down, found himself able to stand upright—found that he was still living, moving, working; could laugh when a joke tickled him, which it did pretty often; could feel hungry when he had fasted, and thought perhaps a little more of the nature of the provision set before him than he had formerly done. This last trait was, no doubt, if one argues rightly, a powerful sign that if he moved now easily enough, still it was in a different way, and on a different platform from the old ones. On his return from Hastings, after the illness which followed his father’s death and Magdalen’s repudiation of him, Dr. Rowntree had attacked him, and gone near to kill him with kindness of a very practical sort; insisting that he was an old man, tired of hard work, who had long been wanting to retire, and had only been waiting till Michael should be ready to take his place. All tenders of payment for his generosity he had firmly and steadily put aside, till Michael had been forced to stop any such suggestions. He had finally accepted the doctor’s goodness, as the latter had fully made up his mind that he should; and so it came to pass that, soon after his return to work, Michael had found himself in possession of a practice of his own, and also that the retirement of his old friend had called a rival into the field, another surgeon, who perhaps thought that the Bradstane circuit was too large for the unaided management of one man. Thus Michael, while he became better off than he had ever been before, in a pecuniary point of view, found at the same time that he must work with all his might, just to keep the lead—not to be swamped in the struggle. The practice he now had was not as lucrative as the practice of the old doctor, untroubled by any rival, had been, but it was a practice on which Michael could have afforded that marriage which had been his goal for three years. When he had come home and begun work, he had heard many rumours, many asseverations, even, that Magdalen Wynter and Otho Askam were to be married.