hand at cards."

Tom obeyed his professional friend--took his medicine, read the paper,
and slept away the best part of the dull March day. At half-past five
he got up and dressed for dinner, and the evening passed very
pleasantly--so pleasantly, indeed, that Georgy was half inclined to
wish that her husband might be afflicted with chronic influenza,
whereby he would be compelled to stop at home. She sighed when Philip
Sheldon slapped his friend's broad shoulder, and told him cheerily that
he would be "all right to-morrow." He would be well again, and there
would be more midnight roistering, and she would be again tormented by
that vision of lighted halls and beautiful diabolical creatures
revolving madly to the music of the Post-horn Galop.

It seemed, however, that poor jealous Mrs. Halliday was to be spared
her nightly agony for some time to come. Tom's cold lasted longer than
he had expected, and the cold was succeeded by a low fever--a bilious
fever, Mr. Sheldon said. There was not the least occasion for alarm, of
course. The invalid and the invalid's wife trusted implicitly in the
friendly doctor who assured them both that Tom's attack was the most
ordinary kind of thing; a little wearing, no doubt, but entirely
without danger. He had to repeat this assurance very often to Georgy,
whose angry feelings had given place to extreme tenderness and
affection now that Tom was an invalid, quite unfitted for the society
of jolly good fellows, and willing to receive basins of beef-tea and
arrow-root meekly from his wife's hands, instead of those edibles of
iniquity, oysters and toasted cheese.

Mr. Halliday's illness was very tiresome. It was one of those
perplexing complaints which keep the patient himself, and the patient's