elve months or so. But now I might as
well throw my money into the gutter as spend it on circulars or
advertisements."

"And a young woman with twenty thousand pounds and something amiss with
her jaw hasn't turned up yet!"

"No, nor an old woman either. I wouldn't stick at the age, if the money
was all right," answered Mr. Sheldon bitterly.

The younger brother shrugged his shoulders and plunged his hands into
his trousers-pockets with a gesture of seriocomic despair. He was the
livelier of the two, and affected a slanginess of dress and talk and
manner, a certain "horsey" style, very different from his elder
brother's studied respectability of costume and bearing. His clothes
were of a loose sporting cut, and always odorous with stale tobacco. He
wore a good deal of finery in the shape of studs and pins and dangling
lockets and fusee-boxes; his whiskers were more obtrusive than his
brother's, and he wore a moustache in addition--a thick ragged black
moustache, which would have become a guerilla chieftain rather than a
dweller amidst the quiet courts and squares of Gray's Inn. His position
as a lawyer was not much better than that of Philip as a dentist; but
he had his own plans for making a fortune, and hoped to win for himself
a larger fortune than is, often made in the law. He was a hunter of
genealogies, a grubber-up of forgotten facts, a joiner of broken links,
a kind of legal resurrectionist, a digger in the dust and ashes of the
past; and he expected in due time to dig up a treasure rich enough to
reward the labour and patience of half a lifetime.

"I can afford to wait till I'm forty for my good luck," he said to his
brother sometimes in moments of expansion; "and then I shall have ten
years in which to enjoy myself, and twenty more in which I shall have
life enough left to eat good dinners and drink good wine, and grumble
about the degeneracy of things in general, after the manner of elderly
human nature."

The men stood one on each side of the hearth; George looking at his
brother, Philip looking down at the fire, with his eyes shaded by their
thick black lashes. The fire had become dull and hollow. George bent
down presently and stirred the coals impatiently.

"If there's one thing I hate more than, another--and I hate a good many
things--it's a bad fire," he said. "How's Barlingford--lively as ever,
I suppose?"

"Not much livelier than it was when we left it. Things have gone amiss
with me in London