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 & 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 enquiry 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.
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