His had been a busy life; school, where he had been ambitious to excel; college, where he had worked still more hard for honours, with the intention of studying afterwards for the bar; but fate had directed his steps in another direction, and through an uncle's wish and suggestions, backed by the fact that he held the mine, Duncan Leslie found himself, when he should have been eating his dinners at the Temple, partaking of them in the far West of England, with a better appetite, and perhaps with better prospects from a monetary point of view. His had been so busy a life that the love-idleness complaint of a young man was long in getting a hold, but when it did seize him, the malady was the more intense. He sat there upon the old, worn piece of granite, making no effort to go farther, but letting his memory drift back to those halcyon days when he had first begun to know that he possessed a heart disposed to turn from its ordinary force-pump work to the playing of a sentimental part such as had stranded him where he was, desolate and despairing, a wreck with his future for ever spoiled. He argued on like that, sometimes with tender recollections of happy days when he had gone back home from some encounter, with accelerated pulses and a sensation of hope and joy altogether new. He dwelt upon one particular day when he had come down from the mine to find Louise seated where he then was; and as he recalled the whole scene, he uttered a groan of misery, and swept it away by the interposition of that of the previous evening; and here his wrath once more grew hot against the man who had come between them, for without vanity he could feel that Louise had turned toward him at one time, and that after a while the memory of the trouble which had come upon them would have grown more faint, and then she would once more have listened to his suit. But for that man--He ground his teeth as he recalled Aunt Marguerite's hints and smiles; the allusions to the member of the French _haute noblesse_; their own connection with the blue blood of Gaul, and his own plebeian descent in Aunt Marguerite's eyes. And now that the French noble had arrived, how noble he was in presence and in act. Stealing clandestinely into the house during the father's absence, forcing the woman he professed to love into obedience by threats, till she knelt at his feet as one who pleads for mercy. "And this is the _haute noblesse_!" cried Leslie, with a mocking laugh. "Thank Heaven, I am only a commoner after all."