Charlotte's Inheritance — Book The Fifth Chapter 3 Against Wind and Tide

CHAPTER III. AGAINST WIND AND TIDE.

Between Philip Sheldon and his brother there was at this time a state of feeling somewhat akin to the relations between a subjugated country and its conqueror.

The vanquished is fain to accept whatever the victor is pleased to give, though discontent and impotent rage may be gnawing his entrails.

George Sheldon had been a loser in that game in which the Haygarthian inheritance was the stake.

He had held good cards, and had played them with considerable cleverness; but no play could prevail against his antagonist's ace of trumps.

The ace of trumps was Charlotte Halliday; and as to his mode and matter of playing this card, Mr. Sheldon was for the present profoundly mysterious.

"I have known a good many inscrutable cards in my time," the solicitor of Gray's Inn observed to his elder brother, in the course of fraternal converse; "but I think for inscrutability you put the topper on the lot.

What do you expect to get out of this Haygarth estate?

Come, Phil, let us have your figures in plain English.

I am to have a fifth--that's all signed and sealed.

But how about your share?

What agreement have you got from Miss Halliday?"

"None."

"None!"

"What would the world think of me if I extorted money, or the promise of money, from my wife's daughter?

Do you think I could enforce any deed between her and me?"

"Ah, I see; you go in for respectability.

And you are going to leave the settlement of your claims to your stepdaughter's generosity.

You will let her marry Hawkehurst, with her hundred thousand pounds; and then you will say to those two, 'Mr. and Mrs. Hawkehurst, be so kind as to hand over my share of the plunder.'

That is not _like_ you, Phil."

"Perhaps you will be good enough to spare yourself the trouble of speculating about my motives.

Go your way, and leave me to go mine."

"But this is a case in which I have an interest.

If Charlotte marries Hawkehurst, I don't see how you are to profit, to any extent that you would care about, by the Haygarth fortune.

But, on the other hand, if she should die unmarried, without a will, the money would go to your wife.

O

my God!

Philip Sheldon, is _THAT_ what you mean?"

The question was so sudden, the tone of horror in which it was spoken so undisguised, that Mr. Sheldon the stockbroker was for one moment thrown off his guard.

His breath thickened; he tried to speak, but his dry lips could shape no word.

It was only one moment that he faltered.

In the next he turned upon his brother angrily, and asked what he meant.

"You've been promised _your_ reward," he said; "leave me to look after mine.

You'll take those papers round to Greenwood and Greenwood; they want to talk to you about them."

"Yes, I'll take the papers."

Greenwood and Greenwood were Mr. Sheldon's own solicitors--a firm of some distinction, on whose acumen and experience the stockbroker placed implicit reliance.

They were men of unblemished respectability, and to them Mr. Sheldon had confided the care of his stepdaughter's interests, always reserving the chief power in his own hands.

These gentlemen thought well of the young lady's prospects, and were handling the case in that slow and stately manner which marks the handling of such cases by eminent firms of the slow-and-stately class.

Mr. Sheldon wished his brother good-day, and was about to depart, when George planted himself suddenly before the door.

"Look you here, Phil," he said, with an intensity of manner that was by no means common to him; "I want to say a few words to you, and I will say them.

There was an occasion, ten years ago, on which I ought to have spoken out, and didn't. I have never ceased to regret my cowardice.

Yes, by Jove!

I hate myself for it; and there are times when I feel as if my share in that wretched business was almost as bad as yours."

"I don't know what you mean."

"Of course not.

That's your text, and you'll stick to it.

But you _do_ know what I mean, and you shall know what I mean, if plain words can tell you.

You and I had a friend, Phil.

He was a good friend to me, and I liked him as much as a man of the world can afford to like anybody.

If I had been down in the world, and had asked him for a hundred pounds to give me a new start in life, I think he'd have said, 'George, here's a cheque for you.'

_That's_ my notion of a friend.

And yet I stood by that man's deathbed, and saw him sinking, and knew what ailed him, and didn't stretch out my hand to save him."

"Be so good as to move away from that door," said Mr. Sheldon, livid to the lips with smothered fury, but able to put on a bold front nevertheless.

"I didn't come here to listen to rhodomontade of this kind, or to bandy words with you.

Get out of my way."

"Not till I've said my say.

There shall be no rhodomontade this time.

I

stood by and saw my best friend murdered--by you.

I kept my counsel for your sake, and when you had made your fortune--by his death--I asked you for a little money.

You know how much you gave me, and how graciously you gave it.

If you had given me twenty times the sum you gained by Tom Halliday's death, I would give it back, and twenty times as much again, to bring him back to life, and to feel that I had never aided and abetted a murderer.

Yes, by God, I would!

though I'm not straitlaced or over-scrupulous at the best of times.

But that's past, and all the money in the Bank of England wouldn't undo what you did in Fitzgeorge Street.

But if you try on any such tricks with Tom Halliday's daughter, if _that's_ the scheme you've hatched for getting hold of this money, as surely as we two live, I'll let in the light upon your doings, and save the girl whose father you murdered.

I will, Philip, let come what may.

You can't get _me_ out of the way when it suits you, you see.

_I know you.

_ That's the best antidote against your medicines."

"If you'll be so good as to say these things on 'Change, I can bring an action for libel, or get you put into a madhouse.

There's no good in saying them here."

Philip Sheldon, even in this crisis, was less agitated than his brother, being of a harder nature, and less subject to random impulses of good or evil.

He caught his accuser by the collar of his coat, and flung him violently from the doorway.

Thus ended his visit to Gray's Inn.

Boldly as he had borne himself during the interview, he went to his office profoundly depressed and dispirited.

"So I am to have him against me?"

he said to himself.

"He can do me no real harm; but he can harass and annoy me.

If he should drop any hint to Hawkehurst?

--but he'll scarcely do that.

Perhaps I've ridden him a little too roughly in the past.

And yet if I'd been smoother, where would his demands have ended?

No; concession in these cases means ruin."

He shut himself in his office, and sat down to his desk to confront his difficulties.

For a long time the bark which was freighted with Philip Sheldon's fortunes had been sailing in troubled waters.

He had been an unconscious disciple of Lord Bacon, inasmuch as the boldness inculcated by that philosopher had been the distinguishing characteristic of his conduct in all the operations of life.

As a speculator, his boldness had served him well.

Adventures from which timid spirits shrunk appalled had brought golden harvests to this daring gamester.

When some rich argosy upon the commercial ocean fired her minute-guns, and sent up signals of distress, menaced by the furious tempest, lifted high on the crest of mountainous waves, below which, black and fathomless, yawn the valleys of death,--a frail ark hovering above the ravening jaws of all-devouring Poseidon,--Philip Sheldon was among that chosen band of desperate wreckers who dared to face the storm, and profit by the tempest and terror.

From such argosies, while other men watched and waited for a gleam of sunlight on the dark horizon, Mr. Sheldon had obtained for himself goodly merchandise.

The debenture of railways that were in bad odour; Unitas Bank shares, immediately after the discovery of gigantic embezzlements by Swillenger, the Unitas-Bank secretary; the Mole-and-Burrow railway stock, when the Mole-and-Burrow scheme was as yet in the clouds, and the wiseacres prognosticated its failure; the shares in foreign loans, which the Rothschilds were buying _sub rosa_;--these, and such as these, had employed Mr. Sheldon's capital; and from the skilful manipulation of capital thus employed, Mr. Sheldon had trebled the fortune secured by his alliance with Tom Halliday's widow.

It had been the stockbroker's fate to enter the money market at a time when fortunes were acquired with an abnormal facility.

He had made the most of his advantages, and neglected none of his opportunities.

He had seized Good Fortune by the forelock, and not waited to find the harridan's bald and slippery crown turned to him in pitiless derision.

He had made only one mistake--and that he made in common with many of his fellow-players in the great game of speculation always going on eastward of Temple Bar--he had mistaken the abnormal for the normal: he had imagined that these splendid opportunities were the natural evolvements of an endless sequence of everyday events; and when the sequence was abruptly broken, and when last of the seven fat kine vanished off the transitory scene of life, to make way for a dismal succession of lean kine, there was no sanguine youngster newly admitted to the sacred privileges of "The House" more astounded by the change than Mr. Sheldon.

The panic came like a thief in the night, and it found Mr. Sheldon a speculator for the rise.

The Melampuses and Amphiaraeuses of the Stock Exchange had agreed in declaring that a man who bought into consols at 90 _must_ see his capital increased; and what was true of this chief among securities was of course true of other securities.

The panic came, and from 90, consols declined dismally, slowly, hopelessly, to 85-1/2;

securities less secure sank with a rapidity corresponding with their constitutional weakness.

As during the ravages of an epidemic the weaker are first to fall victims to the destroyer, so while this fever raged on 'Change, the feeble enterprises, the "risky" transactions, sank at an appalling rate, some to total expiry.

The man who holds a roaring lion by the tail could scarcely be worse off than the speculator in these troublous times.

To let go is immediate loss, to hold on for a certain time might be redemption, could one but know the exact moment in which it would be wise to let go.

But to hold on until the beast grows more and more furious, and then to let go and be eaten up alive, is what many men did in that awful crisis.

If Philip Sheldon had accepted his first loss, and been warned by the first indication that marked the turning of the tide, he would have been a considerable loser; but he would not accept his loss, and he would not be warned by that early indication.

He had implicit belief in his own cleverness; and he fancied if every other bark in that tempest-tossed ocean foundered and sank, his boat might ride triumphantly across the harbour-bar, secure by virtue of his science and daring as a navigator.

It was not till he had seen a small fortune melt away in the payment of contango, that he consented to the inevitable.

The mistakes of one year devoured the fruits of nine years' successful enterprise, and the Philip Sheldon of this present year was no richer than the man who had stood by Tom Halliday's bedside and waited the advent of the equal foot that knows no difference between the threshold of kingly palace or pauper refuge.

Not only did he find himself as poor a man as in that hateful stage of his existence--to remember which was a dull dead pain even to _him_--but a man infinitely more heavily burdened.

He had made for himself a certain position, and the fall from that must needs be a cruel and damaging fall, the utter annihilation of all his chances in life.

The stockbroker's fitful slumbers at this time began to be haunted by the vision of a black board fixed against the wall of a public resort, a black board on which appeared his own name.

In what strange places feverish dreams showed him this hideous square of painted deal!

--Now it was on the walls of the rooms he lived in; now on the door of a church, like Luther's propositions; now at a street-corner, where should have been the name of the street; now inky-black against the fair white headstone of his own grave.

Miserable dream, miserable man, for whom the scraping together of sordid dross was life's only object, and who, in losing money, lost all!

This agonizing consciousness of loss and of close-impending disgrace was the wolf which this Spartan stockbroker concealed beneath his waistcoat day after day, while the dull common, joyless course of his existence went on; and his shallow wife smiled at him from the opposite side of his hearth, more interested in a new stitch for her crotchet or berlin-wool work than by the inner life of her husband; and Charlotte and her lover contemplated existence from their own point of view, and cherished their own dreams and their own hopes, and were, in all things, as far away from the moody meditator as if they had been natives of Upper India.

The ruin which impended over the unlucky speculator was not immediate, but it was not far off; the shadow of it already wrapped him in a twilight obscurity.

His repute as a clever and a safe man had left him.

He was described now as a daring man; and the wiseacres shook their heads as they talked of him.

"One of the next to go will be Sheldon," said the wiseacres; but in these days of commercial epidemic there was no saying who would be the first to go.

It was the end of the world in little.

One was taken, and another left.

The Gazette overran its customary column like a swollen river, and flooded a whole page of the Times newspaper; and men looked to the lists of names in the Wednesday and Saturday papers as to the trump of archangels sounding the destruction of the universe.

For some time the bark in which Mr. Sheldon had breasted those turbulent waters had been made of paper.

This was nothing.

Paper boats were the prevailing shipping in those waters; but Captain Sheldon's bark needed refitting, and the captain feared a scarcity of paper, or, worse still, the awful edict issued from some commercial Areopagus that for him there should be no more paper.

Once before, Mr. Sheldon had found himself face to face with ruin complete and irredeemable.

When all common expedients had been exhausted, and his embarrassments had become desperate, he had found a desperate expedient, and had extricated himself from those embarrassments.

The time had come in which a new means of extrication must be found as desperate as the last, if need were.

As Philip Sheldon had faced the situation before, he faced it now--unshrinkingly, though with a gloomy anger against destiny.

It was hard for him that such a thing should have to be repeated.

If he pitied anybody, he pitied himself; and this kind of compassion is very common with this kind of character.

Do not the Casket letters show us--if we may trust them to show us anything--that Mary Stuart was very sorry for herself when she found herself called upon to make an end of Darnley?

In Mr. Swinburne's wonderful study in morbid anatomy, there are perhaps no finer touches than those which reveal the Queen's selfish compassion for her own heartlessness.

CHAPTER IV. DIANA ASKS FOR A HOLIDAY.

Diana informed Mrs. Sheldon of her father's wish that she should leave Bayswater.

Before doing this, she had obtained the Captain's consent to the revelation of her engagement to be married.

"I don't like to leave them in a mysterious manner, papa," she said.

"I have told Charlotte a good deal already, under a promise of secrecy; but I should like to tell Mrs. Sheldon that there is a real reason for my leaving her."

"Very well, my love, since you are so amazingly squeam--honourable," interposed the Captain, remembering how much depended on his daughter's marriage, and what a very difficult person he had found her.

"Yes, my dear, of course; I respect your honourable feeling; and--er--yes--you may tell Mrs. Sheldon--and that of course includes Mr. Sheldon, since the lady is but an inoffensive cipher--that you are about to be married--to a French gentleman of position.

You will, of course, be obliged to mention his name, and then will arise the question as to where and how you met him; and, upon my word, it's confoundedly awkward that you should insist on enlightening these people.

You see, my dear girl, what I want to avoid, for the present, is any chance of collision between the Sheldons and Lenoble."

"Papa!"

exclaimed Diana, impatiently, "why must there be all this scheming?"

"O, very well, Miss Paget; tell them what you like!"

cried the Captain, aggravated beyond endurance by such inherent perversity.

"All I can say is, that a young woman who quarrels with her bread-and-butter is likely to come to dry bread; and very little of that, perhaps.

I wash my hands of the business.

Tell them what you like."

"I will not tell them more than I feel to be actually necessary, papa," the young lady replied calmly.

"I do not think Mr. Sheldon will trouble himself about M. Lenoble.

He seems very much occupied by his own affairs."

"Humph!

Sheldon seems harassed, anxious, does he?"

"Well, yes, papa; I have thought so for the last few months.

If I may venture to judge by the expression of his face, as he sits at home in the evening, reading the paper, or staring at the fire, I am sure he has many anxieties--troubles even.

Mrs. Sheldon and Charlotte do not appear to notice these things.

They are accustomed to see him quiet and reserved, and they don't perceive the change in him as I do."

"O, there is a change, is there?"

"Yes, a decided change."

"Why the deuce couldn't you tell me this before!"

"Why should I tell you that Mr. Sheldon seems anxious?

I should not have told you now, if you had not appeared to dread his interference in our affairs.

I can't help observing these things; but I don't want to play the part of a spy."

"No, you're so infernally punct--so delicate-minded, my love," said the Captain, pulling himself up suddenly, for the second time.

"Forgive me if I was impatient just now.

You look at these things from a higher point of view than that of a battered old man of the world like me.

But if you should see anything remarkable in Mr. Sheldon's conduct on another occasion, my love, I should be obliged to you if you would be more communicative.

He and I have been allied in business, you see, and it is important for me to know these things."

"I have not seen anything remarkable in Mr. Sheldon's conduct, papa; I have only seen him thoughtful and dispirited.

And I suppose anxieties are common to every man of business."

Georgy received Miss Paget's announcement with mingled lamentations and congratulations.

"I am sure I am heartily glad for your sake, Diana," she said; "but what we shall do without you, I don't know.

Who is to see to the drawing-room being dusted every morning, when you are gone?

I'm sure I tremble for the glass shades.

Don't imagine I'm not pleased to think you should settle in life advantageously, my love.

I'm not so selfish as that; though I will say that there never was a girl with more natural talent for making-up pretty little caps than you.

The one I have on has been admired by everybody.

Even Ann Woolper this morning, when I was going into the butcher's book with her--for I insist upon going into the butcher's book with her weekly, whether she likes it or not; though the way that man puts down the items is so bewildering that I feel myself a perfect baby in her hands,--even Ann admired it, and said how young-looking it is.

And then she brought up the time in Fitzgeorge Street, and poor Tom's illness, and almost upset me for the rest of the day.

And now, dear, let me offer you my sincere congratulations.

Of course, you know that you would always have had a home with me; but service, or at least companionship, is no inheritance, as the proverb says; and for your own sake I'm very glad to think that you are going to have a house of your own.

And now tell me what he is like, Monsieur what's-his-name?"

Mrs. Sheldon had been told, but had not remembered the name.

Her great anxiety, as well as Charlotte's, was to know what manner of man the affianced lover was.

If Diana's future happiness had been contingent on the shape of her husband's nose, or the colour of his eyes, these two ladies could not have been more anxious upon the subject.

"Has he long eyelashes, and a dreamy look in his eyes, like Valentine?"

asked Charlotte, secretly convinced that her lover had a copyright in these personal graces.

"Does he wear whiskers?"

asked Georgy.

"I remember, when I was quite a girl, and went to parties at Barlingford, being struck by Mr. Sheldon's whiskers.

And I was quite offended with papa, who was always making sarcastic remarks, for calling them mutton-chop whiskers; but they really were the shape of mutton-cutlets at that time.

He wears them differently now."

Mrs. Sheldon branched off into a disquisition on whiskers, and Diana escaped from the task of describing her lover.

She could not have described him to Georgy.

By-and-by she asked permission to leave Bayswater for a fortnight, in order to see her lover's home and friends.

"I will come back to you, and stay as long as you like, dear Mrs. Sheldon," she said, "and make you as many caps as you please.

And I will make them for you by and by, when I am living abroad, and send them over to you in a bandbox.

It will be a great delight to me to be of some little service to a friend who has been so kind.

And perhaps you will fancy the caps are prettier when they can boast of being French."

"You darling generous-minded girl!

And you won't go away for a fortnight and never come back again, will you, dear?

I had a cook who did that, and left me with a large dinner-party hanging over my head; and how I got through it--with a strange man-cook, who charged a guinea, and used fresh butter, at twentypence, a pound, as if it had been dirt, and two strange men to wait--I don't know.

It all seemed like a dream.

And since then we have generally had everything from the confectioner's; and I assure you, to feel that you can wash your hands of the whole thing, and sit down at the head of your table with your mind as free from care as if you were a visitor, is worth all the expense."

Diana promised she would not behave like the cook; and two days after this conversation left the London Bridge terminus with her father and Gustave Lenoble.

Mr. Sheldon troubled himself very little about this departure.

He was informed of Miss Paget's intended marriage; and the information awakened neither surprise nor interest in his heavily-burdened mind.

"A Frenchman, a friend of her father's!"

he said; "some swindling adventurer, no doubt," he thought.

And this was as much consideration as he could afford to bestow upon Miss Paget's love affairs at this present time.

CHAPTER V. ASSURANCE DOUBLY SURE.

On the day after Miss Paget's departure Mr. Sheldon came home from the City rather earlier than usual, and found Charlotte alone in the drawing-room, reading a ponderous volume from Mudie of an instructive and edifying character, with a view to making herself clever, in order that she might better understand that prodigy of learning, Mr. Hawkehurst.

She was somewhat inclined to yawn over the big book, which contained a graphic account of recent discoveries of an antiquarian nature.

Her mind was not yet attuned to the comprehension of the sublimer elements in such discoveries.

She saw only a dry as dust record of futile gropings in desert sand for the traces of perished empires.

Her imagination was not cultivated to that point whereat the gift which Mr. Lewes calls "insight" becomes the daily companion, nay, indeed, the ever-haunting and nightmare-bringing influence of the dreamer.

For her sands were only sands, the stones were only stones.

No splendour of fallen palaces, no glory and pride of perished kings, no clash and clamour of vanished courts, arose from those barren sands, with all their pomp and circumstance, conjured into being by half a word on a broken pillar, or a date upon a Punic monument.

Miss Halliday looked up with a sigh of fatigue as her stepfather came into the room.

It was not a room that he particularly affected, and she was surprised when he seated himself in the easy-chair opposite her, and poked the fire, as if with the intention of remaining.

"You shouldn't read by firelight, my dear," he said; "it is most destructive to the eyesight."

"I dare say my sight will last my time, papa," the young lady replied carelessly; "but it's very kind of you to think of it, and I won't read any more."

Mr. Sheldon made no reply to this observation.

He sat looking at the fire, with that steady gaze which was habitual to him--the gaze of the man who plans and calculates.

"My dear," he said by-and-by, "it seems that this money to which you may or may not be entitled is more than we thought at first; in fact, it appears that the sum is a considerable one.

I have been, and still am, particularly anxious to guard against disappointment on your part, as I know the effect that such a disappointment is apt to produce upon a person's life.

The harassing slowness of Chancery proceedings is proverbial; I am therefore especially desirous that you should not count upon this money."

"I shall never do that, papa.

I should certainly like a fine edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica for Valentine, by-and-by, as he says that is essential for a literary man; and a horse, for people say literary men ought to take horse exercise.

But beyond that--" "We need scarcely go into these details, my dear.

I want you to understand the broad facts of the case.

While, on the one hand, our success in obtaining the inheritance which we are about to claim for you is uncertain, on the other hand the inheritance is large.

Of course, when I presented you with the sum of five thousand pounds, I had no idea of this possible inheritance."

"O, of course not, papa."

"But I now find that there is such a possibility as your becoming a--well--a rich woman."

"O papa!"

"In which case I may conclude that your mother would benefit in some measure from your good fortune."

"Can you doubt that, papa?

There should be no measure to her benefit from any money obtained by me."

"I do not doubt that, my dear.

And it is with that idea that I wish to make a proposition to you--for your mother's possible advantage."

"I shall be happy to do anything you wish, papa."

"It must be done as a spontaneous act of your own, Charlotte, not in accordance with any wish of mine."

"What is it that I am to do?"

asked Charlotte.

"Well, my dear, you see it is agreed between us that if you do get this money, your mother is certain to benefit considerably.

But unhappily the proceedings are likely to drag on for an indefinite time; and in the course of that time it comes within the limits of possibility that your decease may precede that of your mother."

"Yes, papa."

"In which case your mother would lose all hope of any such advantage."

"Of course, papa."

Charlotte could not help thinking that there was something sordid in this discussion--this calculation of possible gain or loss contingent on her fresh young life.

But she concluded that it was the nature of business men to see everything from a debased standpoint, and that Mr. Sheldon was no more sordid than other men of his class.

"Well, papa?"

she asked presently, after some moments of silence, during which she and her stepfather had both been absorbed in the contemplation of the fire.

"Well, my dear," replied Mr. Sheldon slowly, "I have been thinking that the natural and easy way of guarding against all contingencies would be by your effecting an insurance on your life in your mother's favour."

"No, no, papa!"

cried Charlotte, with unwonted vehemence; "I would rather do anything than that!"

"What can be your objection to such a very simple arrangement?"

"I dare say my objection seems foolish, childish even, papa; but I really have a horror of life assurances.

I always think of papa--my own poor father, whom I loved so dearly.

It seemed as if he put a price upon his life for us.

He was so anxious to insure his life--I remember hearing him talk of it at Hyley, when I was a child--to make things straight, as he said, for us; and, you see, very soon afterwards he died."

"But you can't suppose the insurance of his life had anything to do with his death?"

"Of course not, I am not so childish as that; only--" "Only you have a foolish lackadaisical prejudice against the only means by which you can protect your mother against a contingency that is so remote as to be scarcely worth consideration.

Let it pass."

There was more anger in the tone than in the words.

It was not that angry tone, but the mention of her mother, that impressed Miss Halliday.

She began to consider that her objections were both foolish and selfish.

"If you really think I ought to insure my life, I will do so," she said presently.

"Papa did as much for those he loved; why should I be less thoughtful of others?"

Having once brought Miss Halliday to this frame of mind, the rest was easy.

It was agreed between them that as Valentine Hawkehurst was to be kept in ignorance of his betrothed's claim to certain moneys now in the shadowy under-world of Chancery, so he must be kept in ignorance of the insurance.

It was only one more secret, and Charlotte had learned that it was possible to keep a secret from her lover.

"I suppose before we are married I shall able to tell him everything?"

she said.

"Certainly, my dear.

All I want is to test his endurance and his prudence.

If the course of events proves him worthy of being trusted, I will trust him."

"I am not afraid of that, papa."

"Of course not, my dear.

But, you see, I have to protect your interests;

and I cannot afford to see this gentleman with your eyes.

I am compelled to be prudent."

The stockbroker sighed as he said this--a sigh of utter weariness.

Remorse was unknown to him; the finer fibres upon which that chord is struck had not been employed in the fabrication of his heart.

But there is a mental fatigue which is a spurious kind of remorse, and has all the anguish of the nobler feeling.

It is an utter weariness and prostration of spirit--a sickness of heart and mind--a bitter longing to lie down and die--the weariness of a beaten hound rather than of a baffled man.

This was what Mr. Sheldon felt, as the threads of the web which he was weaving multiplied, and grew daily and hourly more difficult of manipulation.

Success in the work which he had to do depended on so many contingencies.

Afar off glittered the splendid goal--the undisputed possession of the late John Haygarth's hundred thousand pounds; but between the schemer and that chief end and aim of all his plottings what a sea of troubles!

He folded his arms behind his head, and looked across the girlish face of his companion into the shadow and the darkness.

In those calculations which were for ever working themselves out in this man's brain, Charlotte Halliday was only one among many figures.

She had her fixed value in every sum; but her beauty, her youth, her innocence, her love, her trust, made no unit of that fixed figure, nor weighed in the slightest degree with him who added up the sum.

Had she been old, ugly, obnoxious, a creature scarcely fit to live, she would have represented exactly the same amount in the calculations of Philip Sheldon.

The graces that made her beautiful were graces that he had no power to estimate.

He knew she was a pretty woman; but he knew also that there were pretty women to be seen in any London street; and the difference between his stepdaughter and the lowest of womankind who passed him in his daily walks was to him little more than a social prejudice.

The insurance business being once decided on, Mr. Sheldon lost no time in putting it into execution.

Although he made a point of secrecy as regarded Mr. Hawkehurst, he went to work in no underhand manner, but managed matters after a highly artistic and superior fashion.

He took his stepdaughter to the offices of Greenwood and Greenwood, and explained her wishes to one of those gentlemen in her presence.