all conscious of the progress of time.
Georgy had been right in her gloomy forebodings of bad behaviour on the
part of Mr. Halliday. It was nearly one o'clock when a loud double
knock announced that gentleman's return. The wind had been howling
drearily, and a sharp, slanting rain had been pattering against the
windows for the last half-hour, while Mrs. Halliday's breast had been
racked by the contending emotions of anxiety and indignation.

"I suppose he couldn't get a cab," she exclaimed, as the knock startled
her from her listening attitude--for however intently a midnight
watcher may be listening for the returning wanderer's knock, it is not
the less startling when it comes?--"and he has walked home through the
wet, and now he'll have a violent cold, I daresay," added Georgy
peevishly.

"Then it's lucky for him he's in a doctor's house," answered Mr.
Sheldon, with a smile. He was a handsome man, no doubt, according to
the popular idea of masculine perfection, but he had not a pleasant
smile. "I went through the regular routine, you know, and am as well
able to see a patient safely through a cold or fever as I am to make
him a set of teeth."

Mr. Halliday burst into the room at this moment, singing a fragment of
the "Chough and Crow" chorus, very much out of tune. He was in
boisterously high spirits, and very little the worse for liquor. He had
only walked from Covent Garden, he said, and had taken nothing but a
tankard of stout and a Welsh rarebit. He had been hearing the divinest
singing--boys with the voices of angels--and had been taking his supper
in a place which duchesses themselves did not disdain to peep at from
the sacred recesses of a loge grillee, George Sheldon had told him. But
poor country-bred Georgina Halliday would not believe in the duchesses,
or the angelic singing boys, or the primitive simplicity of Welsh
rarebits. She had a vision of beautiful women, and halls of dazzling
light, where there was the mad music of perpetual Post-horn Galops,
with a riotous accompaniment of huzzas and the popping of champagne
corks--where the sheen of satin and the glitter of gems bewildered the
eye of the beholder. She had seen such a picture once on the stage, and
had vaguely associated it with all Tom's midnight roisterings ever
afterwards.

The roisterer's garments were very wet, and it was in vain that his
wife and Philip Sheldon entreated him to change them for dry ones, or
to go to bed immediately. He s