"The world will seem very dull and empty to me without her," he said to himself. "I have done an unselfish thing for once in my life. I wonder whether the recording angel will carry that up to my credit, and whether the other fellow will blot out any of the old score in consideration of this one little bit of self-sacrifice."
BOOK THE THIRD.
HEAPING UP RICHES.
CHAPTER I.
A FORTUNATE MARRIAGE.
Eleven years had passed lightly enough over the glossy raven locks of Mr. Philip Sheldon. There are some men with whom Time deals gently, and he was one of them. The hard black eyes had lost none of their fierce brightness; the white teeth flashed with all their old brilliancy; the complexion, which had always been dusky of hue, was perhaps a shade or two darker; and the fierce black eyes seemed all the blacker by reason of the purple tinge beneath them. But the Philip Sheldon of to-day was, taken altogether, a handsomer man than the Philip Sheldon of eleven years ago.
Within those eleven years the Bloomsbury dentist had acquired a higher style of dress and bearing, and a certain improvement of tone and manner. He was still an eminently respectable man, and a man whose chief claim to the esteem of his fellows lay in the fact of his unimpeachable respectability; but his respectability of to-day, as compared with that of eleven years before, was as the respectability of Tyburnia when contrasted with that of St. Pancras. He was not an aristocratic-looking man, or an elegant man; but you felt, as you contemplated him, that the bulwarks of the citadel of English respectability are defended by such as he.
Mr. Sheldon no longer experimentalised with lumps of beeswax and plaster-of-paris. All the appalling paraphernalia of his cruel art had long since been handed over to an aspiring young dentist, together with the respectable house in Fitzgeorge-street, the furniture, and—the connexion. And thus had ended Philip Sheldon's career as a surgeon-dentist. Within a year of Tom Halliday's death his disconsolate widow had given her hand to her first sweetheart, not forgetful of her dead husband or ungrateful for much kindness and affection experienced at his hands, but yielding rather to Philip's suit because she was unable to advance any fair show of reason whereby she might reject him.
"I told you, she'd be afraid to refuse you," said George Sheldon, when the dentist came home from Barlingford, where Tom Halliday's widow was living with her mother.
Philip had answered his brother's questions rather ambiguously at first, but in the end had been fain to confess that he had asked Mrs. Halliday to marry him, and that his suit had prospered.