The faint female voice muttered some indistinct words about what he “owed to himself,” and the “rightful station that belonged to him;” but he speedily cut the reflection short as he said: “So long as a man is poor as I am, he can only hold his head high by total estrangement from the world. Let him dare to mix with it, and his threadbare coat and patched shoes will soon convince him that they will extend no equality to him who comes among them in such beggarly fashion. With what authority, I ask, can he speak, whose very poverty refutes his sentiments, and the simple question stands forth unanswerable: 'If this man knew so much, why is he as we see him?'” “This is, then, to say that misfortune is never unmerited. Surely you do not mean that, Herbert?” said she, with an eagerness almost painful. “It is exactly what I would say,--that for all the purposes of worldly judgments upon men, there is no easier rule than to assume that they who fail deserve failure. Richelieu never asked those who sought high command, 'Are you skilful in the field? are you clever in strategy?' but' 'Are you lucky?'” A deep sigh was her only answer. “I wonder who Millar's fourth man is to be? Colonel Karstairs, I know, is one; a man of importance to me, Grace,” said he, laughing; “a two- guinea subscriber to the dispensary! How I wish I were in a more fitting spirit of submissiveness to my betters; and, by ill fortune, this is one of my rebellious days!” “Don't go, Tom! Don't go, I say!” yelled out Poll. “Prophet of evil, and evil prophet, hold your tongue! I will go,” said he, sternly, and as if answering a responsible adviser; and setting his hat on, with a certain air of dogged defiance, he left the house. His wife arose, and with feeble steps tottered to the door of the cottage to look after him. A few steps brought him to the foot of the cliff, up the steep face of which a zigzag path led upwards for fully four hundred feet, a narrow track trodden by the bare feet of hardy mountaineers into some semblance of a pathway, but such as few denizens of towns would willingly have taken. Layton, however, stepped along like one whose foot was not new to the heather; nay, the very nature of the ascent, the bracing air of the sea, and something in the peril itself of the way, seemed to revive in the man his ancient vigor; and few, seeing him from the beach below, as he boldly breasted the steep bluff, or sprang lightly over some fissured chasm, would have deemed him one long since past the prime of life,--one who had spent more than youth, and its ambitions, in excess.