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.

"That way of putting it is not very complimentary to me," he said, drawing himself up rather stiffly. "Georgy and I were attached to each other long ago, and it is scarcely strange if—"

"If you should make a match of it, Tom being gone. Poor old Tom! He and I were such cronies. I've always had an idea that neither you nor the other fellow quite understood that low fever of his. You did your best, no doubt; but I think you ought to have pulled him through somehow. However, that's not a pleasant subject to talk of just now; so I'll drop it, and wish you joy, Phil. It'll be rather a good match for you, I fancy," added George, contemplating his brother with a nervous twitching of his lips, which suggested that his mouth watered as he thought of Philip's good fortune.

"It's a very nice thing you drop into, old fellow, isn't it?" he asked presently, seeing that his brother was rather disinclined to discuss the subject.

"You know the state of my affairs well enough to be sure that I couldn't afford to marry a poor woman," answered Philip.

"And that it has been for a long time a vital necessity with you to marry a rich one," interjected his brother.