the only creature he loves?"--and caved. In forty-eight hours more a
brougham waited at Mrs. Staines's door. The servant engaged to drive
it was Andrew Pearman, a bachelor, and, hitherto, an under-groom. He
readily consented to be coachman, and to do certain domestic work as
well. So Mrs. Staines had a man-servant as well as a carriage.

Ere long, three or four patients called, or wrote, one after the other.
These Rosa set down to brougham, and crowed; she even crowed to Lady
Cicely Treherne, to whose influence, and not to brougham's, every one of
these patients was owing. Lady Cicely kissed her, and demurely enjoyed
the poor soul's self-satisfaction.

Staines himself, while he drove to or from these patients, felt more
sanguine, and buoyed as he was by the consciousness of ability, began to
hope he had turned the corner.

He sent an account of Lord Ayscough's case to a medical magazine: and so
full is the world of flunkeyism, that this article, though he withheld
the name, retaining only the title, got the literary wedge in for him
at once: and in due course he became a paid contributor to two medical
organs, and used to study and write more, and indent the little stone
yard less than heretofore.

It was about this time circumstances made him acquainted with Phoebe
Dale. Her intermediate history I will dispose of in fewer words than it
deserves. Her ruin, Mr. Reginald Falcon, was dismissed from his club,
for marking high cards on the back with his nail. This stopped his
remaining resource--borrowing: so he got more and more out at elbows,
till at last he came down to hanging about billiard-rooms, and making a
little money by concealing his game; from that, however, he rose to be a