"I will not," answered Valentine resolutely, with a very unpleasant recollection of his dealings with George Sheldon.

"Give me your hand upon that," cried the stockbroker.

Upon this the two men shook hands, and Valentine's fingers were almost crushed in the cold hard grip of Mr. Sheldon's muscular hand. And now there came upon Valentine's ear the sound of one of Mendelssohn's Lieder ohne Worte, tenderly played by the gentle hands he knew so well. And the lover began to feel that he could no longer sit sipping the stockbroker's port with a hypocritical pretence of appreciation, and roasting himself before the blazing fire, the heat whereof was multiplied to an insufferable degree by grate and fender of reflecting steel.

Mr. Sheldon was not slow to perceive his guest's impatience, and having made exactly the impression he wanted to make, was quite willing that the interview should come to an end.

"You had better be off to the drawing-room," he said, good naturedly; "I see you are in that stage of the fever in which masculine society is only a bore. You can go and hear Charlotte play, while I read the evening papers and write a few letters. You can let her know that you and I understand each other. Of course we shall see you very often. You'll eat your Christmas turkey with us, and so on; and I shall trust to your honour for the safe keeping of that promise you made me just now," said Mr. Sheldon.

"And I shall keep an uncommonly close watch upon you and the young lady, my friend," added that gentleman, communing with his own thoughts as he crossed the smart little hall, where two Birmingham iron knights in chain armour bestrode their gallant chargers, on two small tables of sham malachite.

Mr. Sheldon's library was not a very inspiring apartment. His ideas of a sanctum sanctorum did not soar above the commonplace. A decent square room, furnished with plenty of pigeon-holes, a neat brass scale for the weighing of letters, a copying-press, a waste-paper basket, a stout brass-mounted office inkstand capable of holding a quart or so of ink, and a Post-office Directory, were all he asked for his hours of leisure and meditation. In a handsome glazed bookcase, opposite his writing-table, appeared a richly-bound edition of the Waverley Novels, Knight's Shakespeare, Hume and Smollett, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Gibbon; but, except when Georgy dusted the sacred volumes with her own fair hands, the glass doors of the bookcase were never opened.

Mr. Sheldon turned on the gas, seated himself at his comfortable writing-table, and took up his pen. A quire of office note-paper, with his City address upon it, lay ready beneath his hand; but he did not begin to write immediately. He sat for some time with his elbows on the table, and his chin in his hands, meditating with dark fixed brows.