That was an ardent and an ambitious spirit which shone out of Eustace Thorburn’s gray eyes; but if the fiery sword had chafed the scabbard a little during three years of academical routine and Villebrumeuse monotony, the young man had been patient and contented withal. There was a public library in Villebrumeuse to which the tutor had free entrance, and in the mediæval chambers of this institution his leisure had been spent. That dreamy idleness amongst good books had been very pleasant to him; his work in the academy was endurable, despite its tedious and laborious nature; and he had a lurking tenderness for the quaint old city, the slow canals overshadowed by green trees, the simple people, and the old-world customs. Thus, if there were times when the eager spirit would fain have soared to loftier and fairer regions, the young student and teacher had not been altogether unhappy since his destiny had brought him to this place to earn his bread amongst strangers. Amongst strangers? Were the inhabitants of this Belgian city any more strange to him than all the other inhabitants of this populous earth--except the one man and woman who made the sum-total of his kindred and friends? Amongst strangers? Why, if the statue of Van Eyck could have descended from yonder pedestal, to walk in the streets of the city, the animated effigy could scarcely have been a lonelier creature than the young man who passed to and fro athwart the sloping shadow on the flags this July afternoon. Looking backward, through the shadows of the past, how many of those images, familiar to most men, were wanting in the mystic pictures that memory presented to Eustace Thorburn! Memory, let him question her never so closely, could not show him any faint tracing of a father’s face flickering dimly athwart the half-consciousness of infancy. Nor could he, in surveying the events of his childhood, recall so much as one visit to a father’s grave, one accidental utterance of a father’s name, one object, however trivial, associated with a father’s existence--a picture, a sword, a book, a watch, a tress of hair. The time had been when he had been wont to question his mother about this missing father; but that was long ago. The time had come, and too quickly in this young man’s life, when a precocious wisdom had checked his questioning, and he had learned to refrain from all reference to a father’s name, as the one subject, of all others, most scrupulously to be avoided by his lips. He was twenty-three years of age, and he had never been told his father’s name or position in the world. For the last ten years of his life it had been a common thing for him to lie awake in the solemn quiet of the night, thinking of that unknown father, and wondering whether he were alive or dead. He knew that he had no claim to the name which he bore, and that he had as good a right to call himself a Guelph or a Plantagenet as he had to call himself Thorburn.