rstand the ecstatic delight of
perpetual hempseed and an occasional peck at a dirty lump of sugar."

After this there came all the bustle of packing and preparation for
departure, and a kind of saturnalia prevailed at Hyde Lodge--a
saturnalia which terminated with the breaking-up ball: and who among
the crowd of fair young dancers so bright as Charlotte Halliday,
dressed in the schoolgirl's festal robes of cloud-like muslin, and with
her white throat set off by a black ribbon and a gold locket?

Diana sat in a corner of the schoolroom towards the close of the
evening, very weary of her share in the festival, and watched her
friend, half in sadness, half in envy.

"Perhaps if I were like her, _he_ would love me," she thought.

CHAPTER III.

GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS.

For George Sheldon the passing years had brought very little
improvement of fortune. He occupied his old dingy chambers in Gray's
Inn, which had grown more dingy under the hand of Time; and he was wont
to sit in his second-floor window on sultry summer Sundays, smoking his
solitary cigar, and listening to the cawing of the rooks in the gardens
beneath him, mingled with the voices of rebellious children, and shrill
mothers threatening to "do for them," or to "flay them alive," in
Somebody's Rents below. The lawyer used to be quite meditative on those
Sunday afternoons, and would wonder what sort of a fellow Lord Bacon
was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when
so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of
Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since--agreeably instigated
thereto by the casuistry of Escobar.

Mr. Sheldon's prospects were by no means promising. From afar off he
beheld his brother's star shining steadily in the commercial firmament;
but, except for an occasional dinner, he was very little the better for
the stockbroker's existence. He had reminded his brother very often,
and very persistently, of that vague promise which the dentist had made
in the hour of his adversity--the promise to help his brother if ever
he did "drop into a good thing." But as it is difficult to prevent a
man who is disposed to shuffle from shuffling out of the closest
agreement that was ever made between Jones of the one part, and Smith
of the other part, duly signed, and witnessed, and stamped with the
sixpenny seal of infallibility, so is it still more difficult to obtain
the performance of loosely-wo