"Who says I am going to break it?" demanded Philip Sheldon with an injured air. "You shouldn't be in such a hurry to cry out, George. You take the tone of a social Dick Turpin, and might as well hold a pistol to my head while you're about it. Don't alarm yourself. I have told you I will do what I can for you. I cannot, and I shall not, say more."

The two men looked at each other. They were in the habit of taking the measure of all creation in their own eminently practical way, and each took the other's measure now. After having done which, they parted with all cordial expressions of good-will and brotherly feeling. George went back to his dusty chambers in Gray's Inn, and Philip prepared for his return to Barlingford and his marriage with Georgina Halliday.

For ten years Georgy had been Philip Sheldon's wife, and she had found no reason to complain of her second choice. The current of her life had flowed smoothly enough since her first lover had become her husband. She still wore moire-antique dresses and gold chains; and if the dresses were of more simple fashion, and the chains were less obtrusively displayed, she had to thank Mr. Sheldon for the refinement in her taste. Her views of life in general had expanded under Mr. Sheldon's influence. She no longer thought a high-wheeled dog-cart and a skittish mare the acme of earthly splendour; for she had a carriage and pair at her service, and a smart little page-boy to leap off the box in attendance on her when she paid visits or went shopping. Instead of the big comfortable old-fashioned farmhouse at Hyley, with its mysterious passages and impenetrable obscurities in the way of cupboards, she occupied an intensely new detached villa in Bayswater, in which the eye that might chance to grow weary of sunshine and glitter would have sought in vain for a dark corner wherein to repose itself.