face to face with a blacker prospect
than that which lay before Philip Sheldon; and yet his manner to-night
was not the dull blank apathy of despair. It was the manner of a man
whose brain is occupied by busy thoughts; who has some elaborate scheme
to map out and arrange before he is called upon to carry his plans into
action.

"It would be a good business for me," he muttered, "if I had pluck
enough to carry it through."

The fire went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards.
The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve, and still
Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth. The servants
had retired at eleven, after a good deal of blundering with bars and
shutters, and unnecessary banging of doors. That unearthly silence
peculiar to houses after midnight reigned in Mr. Sheldon's domicile,
and he could hear the voices of distant roisterers, and the miauling of
neighbouring cats, with a painful distinctness as he sat brooding in
his silent room. The fact that a mahogany chiffonier in a corner gave
utterance to a faint groan occasionally, as of some feeble creature in
pain, afforded him no annoyance. He was superior to superstitious
fancies, and all the rappings and scratchings of spirit-land would have
failed to disturb his equanimity. He was a strictly practical man--one
of those men who are always ready, with a stump of lead-pencil and the
back of a letter, to reduce everything in creation to figures.

"I had better read up that business before they come," he said, when he
had to all appearance "thought out" the subject of his reverie. "No
time so good as this for doing it quietly. One never knows who is
spying about in the daytime." He looked at his watch, and then went to
a cupboard, where there were bundles of wood and matches and old
newspapers,--for it was his habit to light his own fire occasionally
when he worked unusually late at night or early in the morning. He
relighted his fire now as cleverly as any housemaid in Bloomsbury, and
stood watching it till it burned briskly. Then he lit a taper, and went
downstairs to the professional torture-chamber. The tall horsehair
chair looked unutterably awful in the dim glimmer of the taper, and a
nervous person could almost have fancied it occupied by the ghost of
some patient who had expired under the agony of the forceps. Mr.
Sheldon lighted the gas in a movable branch which he was in the habit
of turning almost into the mout