He rose from his seat and began pacing the room with impatient strides. Faust followed him for one or two turns, wagging his tail and gazing up into his face with loving eyes; but finding his efforts to attract attention unavailing, he uttered a piteous whine, and, retreating to a corner, crouched down, as perfectly aware that his master was unhappy as if he had been a human creature and could have “told his love” in words. Frere would have spoken, but Lewis checked him by a gesture, and continued his rapid walk for some minutes in silence. At length he spoke-- “You think me selfish and ungrateful, and you are right; I am so. I have schooled myself to bear all this, and I _will_ bear it; but bitter thoughts arise and at times overpower me. I am very young” (“True for you,” muttered Frere, _sotto voce_), “and I am so unfit for such a life as lies before me, a life of tame and ceaseless drudgery, in which to indulge the high aspirations and noble daring that win men honour becomes misplaced folly; to live with people whose equal, if not superior, I feel myself, in a semi-menial capacity; to obey when I would command; to forfeit all that is bright and fair in existence--intercourse with the higher order of minds, the society of pure and refined spirits; and, above all, to lose the only thing I really prize on earth--my independence. “Well,” he continued, after a pause, “the die is cast, and repining is worse than useless. I will give this experiment a fair trial; it may be the harness will set more easily on me than I imagine; and should it become unbearable, I can but cast it off and start afresh: there is such a thing as to compel one’s destiny!” CHAPTER VIII.--LEWIS RECEIVES A LECTURE AND A COLD BATH. Richard Frere listened to the somewhat grandiloquent remark with which the last chapter concluded, muttering to himself, “‘Compel destiny,’ indeed; it strikes me you’ll find ‘destiny,’ as you call it, will have the best of it at that game;” then turning to his companion, he observed more gravely, “Now, listen to me, Lewis. What you have just said is no doubt true enough; you _are_ about as unfit in tastes and habits for the life that is before you as a man well can be, but for that reason it is exactly the very best thing for you. For what purpose do you suppose we are sent into this world? Most assuredly not only to please ourselves, and by following out our own desires and caprices, create a sphere for the exercise and increase of our natural faults. No; the only true view of life is as a school, wherein our characters are to be disciplined, and all the changes and chances, sorrows, trials, and temptations we meet with are the agents by which the education of the soul is carried on.”