The will of the dead man was duly accomplished. The young man was reared in the school of evil and became a curious, experimental subject for his master. The late Lord Mowbray had been a reclaimed fanatic; after his own fashion he preached as do nearly all of his compatriots. Lebeau contented himself with observation, and consigned these observations to a certain manuscript, written in French, which was entitled: "A Treatise on Pleasure; or, A Rational Journal of a Young English Nobleman. To be published one hundred years after my death." Lebeau remarked many things; among others these:-- "This youth, reared in the very lap of happiness, was not happy. The pleasure which formed his daily lessons seemed to him stale and forced. Over and beyond the delights which were multiplied for him and almost imposed upon him, he dreamed of others to which he could not attain, thereby proving that the true vocation of man is the unattainable, the unreal. He was bred according to nature, that is to say, after the fashion of savages; his joys revolved in the narrow, wretched circle in which the primitive inhabitants of the globe vegetate. Five or six thousand years of civilization have delicately undermined, modelled, and ameliorated this block of confused sensations which we represent. The thousand constraints which man has imposed upon himself, and his privations, voluntary or obligatory, not to mention his griefs, have refined him, perfected his organs of pleasure, increased his faculty of happiness an hundred-fold. Suppress these constraints, these tests, these combats, and you leave him but the swift, bestial joys in which the aborigines, our ancestors, forgot for a moment in the obscurity of their caverns the frightful misery of their existence. Young Mowbray at twenty years of age had run the gamut of fallacious love. He had learned the principles of gallantry and debauchery as one learns Latin; but never having trembled, wept, nor suffered, he was totally ignorant of genuine love." All at once towards Lebeau, that man of infinite complaisance, he experienced a sense of secret resistance. It was upon the day when first he was smitten by the charms of Miss Woodville. A will seemed to interpose between him and the object of his desire, seeming to say: "All women, but not _this one_!" Was it not sufficient that she had become dearer to him than all others? CHAPTER VI. THE HOUSE IN TOTHILL FIELDS.