ia Zell, and he never came away without hitting on the
solution. They are beckoning to me; so good-bye!"

"Anything puzzled him!" muttered Dunn, repeating the words of the
other's story. "If he but knew that what puzzles _me_ at this moment is
myself!"

The very nature of the correspondence that then littered his table might
well warrant what he felt. Who, and what was he, to whom great ministers
wrote confidentially, and secretaries of state began, "My dear Dunn"?
How had he risen to this eminence? What were the gifts by which he held,
and was to maintain it? Most men who have attained to high station from
small beginnings, have so conformed to the exigencies of each new
change in life as to carry but little of what they started with to their
position of eminence; gradually assimilating to the circumstances around
them as they went, they flung the past behind them, only occupied with
those qualities which should fit them for the future. Not so Davenport
Dunn: he was ever present to his own eyes as the son of the very
humblest parentage; as the poor boy educated by charity, struggling
drearily through years of poverty,--the youth discouraged and slighted,
the man repulsed and rejected. Certain incidents of his life never left
him; there they were, as if photographed on his heart; and at will he
could behold himself as he was turned away ignominiously from Kellett's
house; or a morning scarce less sad, as he learned his rejection for the
sizarship; or the day still more bitter that Lord Glengariff put him out
of doors, with words of insult and shame. Like avenging spirits, these
memories travelled with him wherever he journeyed. They sat beside him
as he dined at great men's tables; they loitered with him in his lonely
walks, and whispered into his ear in the dark hours of the night. No
high-hearted hope, no elevating self-reliance, had sustained him through
these youthful reverses; each new failure, on the contrary, seemed to
have impressed him more and more strongly with the conviction that the
gifts which win success in life had not been vouchsafed him; that his
abilities were of that humble order which never elevate their possessor
above mere mediocrity; that if he meant to strive for the great prizes
of life, it must be less by addressing himself to great intellectual
efforts than by a patient study of men themselves,--of their frailties,
their weaknesses, and their follies. Whatever he had seen of the world
had sh