nd
occasion to put him in the wrong by correcting a false quantity; and
when Mr. Austin, after doing his visitor the almost unheard-of honour of
accompanying him to the door, announced "That was what young men were
like in my time"--she could only reply, looking on her handsome father,
"I thought they had been better-looking."

This first visit to the Austins took place in 1855; and it seems it was
some time before Fleeming began to know his mind; and yet longer ere he
ventured to show it. The corrected quantity, to those who knew him well,
will seem to have played its part; he was the man always to reflect over
a correction and to admire the castigator. And fall in love he did; not
hurriedly, but step by step, not blindly, but with critical
discrimination; not in the fashion of Romeo, but, before he was done,
with all Romeo's ardour and more than Romeo's faith. The high favour to
which he presently rose in the esteem of Alfred Austin and his wife
might well give him ambitious notions; but the poverty of the present
and the obscurity of the future were there to give him pause; and when
his aspirations began to settle round Miss Austin, he tasted, perhaps
for the only time in his life, the pangs of diffidence. There was indeed
opening before him a wide door of hope. He had changed into the service
of Messrs. Liddell and Gordon; these gentlemen had begun to dabble in
the new field of marine telegraphy; and Fleeming was already face to
face with his life's work. That impotent sense of his own value, as of a
ship aground, which makes one of the agonies of youth, began to fall
from him. New problems which he was endowed to solve, vistas of new
inquiry which he was fitted to explore, opened before him continually.
His gifts had found their avenue and goal. And with this pleasure of
effective exercise, there must have sprung up at once the hope of what
is called by the world success. But from these low beginnings, it was a
far look upward to Miss Austin: the favour of the loved one seems always
more than problematical to any lover; the consent of parents must be
always more than doubtful to a young man with a small salary, and no
capital except capacity and hope. But Fleeming was not the lad to lose
any good thing for the lack of trial; and at length, in the autumn of
1857, this boyish-sized, boyish-mannered and superlatively ill-dressed
young engineer entered the house of the Austins, with such sinkings as
we may fancy, and a