ht,
broad-shouldered, and powerfully built, with a naturally dark complexion,
which had been tanned still darker by sun and wind, black eyes and heavy
black eyebrows, a head a little bald at the top, and a face that might
have been called almost ugly but for the look of intellectual power in
the broad open forehead and the perfect modelling of the flexible
sensitive mouth; a remarkable face altogether, not easily to be forgotten
by those who had once looked upon it.

This man was John Saltram, the one intimate and chosen friend of Gilbert
Fenton's youth and manhood. They had met first at Oxford, and had seldom
lost sight of each other since the old university days. They had
travelled a good deal together during the one idle year that had preceded
Gilbert's sudden plunge into commerce. They had been up the Nile together
in the course of these wanderings; and here, remote from all civilized
aid, Gilbert had fallen ill of a fever--a long tedious business which
brought him to the very point of death, and throughout which John Saltram
had nursed him with a womanly tenderness and devotion that knew no
abatement. If this had been wanting to strengthen the tie between
them--which it was not--it would have brought them closer together. As it
was, that dreary time of sickness and peril was only a memory which
Gilbert Fenton kept in his heart of hearts, never to grow less sacred to
him until the end of life.

Mr. Saltram was a barrister, almost a briefless one at present, for his
habits were desultory, not to say idle, and he had not taken very kindly
to the slow drudgery of the Bar. He had some money of his own, and added
to his income by writing for the press in a powerful trenchant manner,
with a style that was like the stroke of a sledge-hammer. In spite of
this literary work, for which he got very well paid, Mr. Saltram
generally contrived to be in debt; and there were few periods of his life
in which he was not engaged more or less in the delicate operation of
raising money by bills of accommodation. Habit had given him quite an
artistic touch for this kind of thing, and he did his work fondly, like
some enthusiastic horticulturist who gives his anxious days to the
budding forth of some new orchid or the production of a hitherto
unobtainable tulip. It is doubtful whether money procured from any other
source was ever half so sweet to this gentleman as the cash for which he
paid sixty per cent to the Jews. With these proclivi