his native town of Little
Barlingford, in Yorkshire, where his father and grandfather had been
surgeon-dentists before him, to establish himself in London. He had
disposed advantageously of an excellent practice, and had transferred
his household goods--the ponderous chairs and tables, the wood whereof
had deepened and mellowed in tint under the indefatigable hand of his
grandmother--to the metropolis, speculating on the chance that his
talents and appearance, address and industry, could scarcely fail to
achieve a position. It was further known that he had a brother, an
attorney in Gray's Inn, who visited him very frequently; that he had
few other friends or acquaintance; that he was a shining example of
steadiness and sobriety; that he was on the sunnier side of thirty, a
bachelor, and very good-looking; and that his household was comprised
of a grim-visaged active old woman imported from Barlingford, a girl
who ran errands, and a boy who opened the door, attended to the
consulting-room, and did some mysterious work at odd times with a file
and sundry queer lumps of plaster-of-paris, beeswax, and bone, in a
dark little shed abutting on the yard at the back of the house. This
much had the inhabitants of Fitzgeorge-street discovered respecting Mr.
Sheldon when he had been amongst them four years; but they had
discovered no more. He had made no local acquaintances, nor had he
sought to make any. Those of his neighbours who had seen the interior
of his house had entered it as patients. They left it as much pleased
with Mr. Sheldon as one can be with a man at whose hands one has just
undergone martyrdom, and circulated a very flattering report of the
dentist's agreeable manners and delicate white handkerchief, fragrant
with the odour of eau-de-Cologne. For the rest, Philip Sheldon lived
his own life, and dreamed his own dreams. His opposite neighbours, who
watched him on sultry summer evenings as he lounged near an open window
smoking his cigar, had no more knowledge of his thoughts and fancies
than they might have had if he had been a Calmuck Tartar or an
Abyssinian chief.

CHAPTER II.

PHILIP SHELDON READS THE "LANCET."

Fitzgeorge-street was chill and dreary of aspect, under a gray March
sky, when Mr. Sheldon returned to it after a week's absence from
London. He had been to Little Barlingford, and had spent his brief
holiday among old friends and acquaintance. The weather had not been in
favour of that drivi