slowly to and fro as he bent over his hearth, were not his own. One of
his Jewish creditors had a bill of sale on his furniture, and he might
come home any day to find the auctioneer's bills plastered against the
wall of his house, and the auctioneer's clerk busy with the catalogue
of his possessions. If the expected victim came now to buy his
practice, the sacrifice would be made too late to serve his interest.
The men who had lent him the money would be the sole gainers by the
bargain.

Seldom does a man find himself face to face with a blacker prospect
than that which lay before Philip Sheldon; and yet his manner to-night
was not the dull blank apathy of despair. It was the manner of a man
whose brain is occupied by busy thoughts; who has some elaborate scheme
to map out and arrange before he is called upon to carry his plans into
action.

"It would be a good business for me," he muttered, "if I had pluck
enough to carry it through."

The fire went out as he sat swinging the poker backwards and forwards.
The clocks of Bloomsbury and St. Pancras struck twelve, and still
Philip Sheldon pondered and plotted by that dreary hearth. The servants
had retired at eleven, after a good deal of blundering with bars and
shutters, and unnecessary banging of doors. That unearthly silence
peculiar to houses after midnight reigned in Mr. Sheldon's domicile,
and he could hear the voices of distant roisterers, and the miauling of
neighbouring cats, with a painful distinctness as he sat brooding in
his silent room. The fact that a mahogany chiffonier in a corner gave
utterance to a faint groan occasionally, as of some feeble creature in
pain, afforded him no annoyance. He was superior to superstitious