He was a Charles the Twelfth, a Frederick the Great, a Napoleon of the Bar, and he enjoyed a good fight as only the born warrior can enjoy it. For seventeen years he had known no interest and found no pleasure outside his profession. Patiently and uncomplainingly he had passed through his probationary years of poverty and disappointment. He had seen his contemporaries--young men who had started with as much ambition as himself--grow weary of the long waiting, and turn aside to begin anew in other and easier paths the pursuit of fortune. But he held on; and from the first insignificant chance that had been flung in his way, to the full triumphs of his present position, he never swerved by one hair's-breadth from the line he had drawn for himself, or neglected the smallest opportunity. He found himself rapidly growing rich, for he had neither time nor inclination for the spending of money. He exacted his price, in that tacit manner peculiar to his profession, but he set little value on the produce of his labour when the golden stream flowed in upon him. He neither drank nor smoked. He rarely played at any game of hazard; and though, while watching the Derby canter with ignorant eyes, his rapid perception showed him the one horse out of twenty whose build stamped him a winner, he had only been induced to visit a race-course some half-dozen times in the twenty years of his London life. In all those twenty years Laurence O'Boyneville had been a voluntary exile from feminine society. The successful barrister has no time for flower-shows or fancy-fairs, morning concerts or archæological-society meetings, picnics, kettle-drums, or _thès dansantes_. For him the days are too short for social intercourse, the nights too brief for rest. And Mr. O'Boyneville loved his profession, and had given all his mind to the labour of his love. The years went by him with all their changes of fashion, and left him unchanged. His brief holidays were scarcely times of rest, for he carried his work with him wherever he went. Thus it was that at nearly forty years of age the mighty Laurence was still a bachelor. He had seen pretty women and had admired them, with an artistic pleasure in a pretty face; but they had passed him by like the shadows of fair women in the poet's vision. He had no time for more than transient admiration--or let it rather be said that as yet the one face which was to awake his soul from its dull slumber had not dawned upon him.