had elapsed since their
marriage.

As to the eighteen thousand pounds which she had brought Philip
Sheldon, Georgy asked no questions. She knew that she enjoyed luxuries
and splendours which had never been hers in Tom Halliday's lifetime,
and she was content to accept the goods which her second husband
provided. Mr. Sheldon had become a stockbroker, and occupied an office
in some dusky court within a few hundred yards of the Stock Exchange.
He had, according to his own account, trebled Georgy's thousands since
they had been in his hands. How the unsuccessful surgeon-dentist had
blossomed all at once into a fortunate speculator was a problem too
profound for Georgy's consideration. She knew that her husband had
allied himself to a certain established firm of stockbrokers, and that
the alliance had cost him some thousands of Tom Halliday's money. She
had heard of preliminary steps to be taken to secure his admission as a
member of some mysterious confraternity vaguely spoken of as "the
House;" and she knew that Tom Halliday's thousands had been the seed
from which had sprung other thousands, and that her husband had been
altogether triumphant and successful.

It may be that it is easier to rig the market than to induce a given
number of people to resort to a certain dull street in Bloomsbury for
the purpose of having teeth extracted by an unknown practitioner. It is
possible that the stockbroker is like the poet, a creature who is born,
and not made; a gifted and inspired being, not to be perfected by any
specific education; a child of spontaneous instincts and untutored
faculties. Certain it is that the divine afflatus from the nostrils of
the god Plutus seemed to have descended upon Philip Sheldon; for he had
entered the Stock Exchange an inexperienced stranger, and he held his
place there amongst men whose boyhood had been spent in the offices of
Capel-court, and whose youthful strength had been nourished in the
chop-houses of Pinch-lane and Thread-needle-street.

Mrs. Sheldon was satisfied with the general knowledge that Mr. Sheldon
had been fortunate, and had never sought any more precise knowledge of
her husband's affairs. Nor did she seek such knowledge even now, when
her daughter was approaching womanhood, and might ere long need some
dower out of her mother's fortune. Poor Tom, trusting implicitly in the
wife he loved, and making his will only as a precautionary measure, at
a time when he seemed good for fift