hem. 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.

"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, conte