The Highland monthly - National Library of Scotland

132
The lli^klaiid Monthly.
lay before him. He was ambitious, but not ambitious
beyond the brain-power he was confident in possessing,
and which had already displayed itself in academical
distinctions of a high order. But love will deflect and
beguile, distract and tyrannise, in the greatest brain ever
enclo.sed in a human skull, and, albeit good, David Stuart's
brain was neither a Shakespeare's, a Scott's, a Burns' nor
anybody else's in that category. And he was in love
madly, it might be said, with the slight exaggeration to
which people in that way are proverbially supposed to be
by rights subjected. As a rule, to be in love is a healthy
sign of young manhood ; but, as the laird would ask, is
there a truer saying than that exceptions qualify every rule ?
A greater curse can no man have than to be the victim of
a hopeless passion. Pope wrote good sense :— " Man is
alike the glory, jest, and riddle of the world."
He closed the book with a snap which cleansed its
edges of positively the last particle of dust that remained.
For a whole page, his eyes had dutifully followed the
words, line after line, technical or simple, while the mind
was busy digesting the charms of Flora Macgruther. David
had been doing that, more or less, for weeks. His features
bore traces of the pale cast of thought in greater ratio than
the progress of his studies, the consumption of midnight
oil, and his half-slept condition at all justified. This could
not go on ; and he knew it—hence the emphatic verdict of
the opening sentence, brought in by a full jury of his
senses, unanimously.
What had he done? It was with his full knowledge
consent, and approval that Flora Macgruther, the orphan
child of one of his father's distant relations, and his dearest
friend—the representative of a family fully more ancient
than the Stuarts, and heiress of the Macgruther patrimony
—had been betrothed to his elder brother, Richard. This
was in accordance with the cherished wish of the two heads
of families, solemnised by two death-beds, that Flora and
Richard should wed ; and both seemed very happy that
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