CHAPTER III.
GEORGE SHELDON'S PROSPECTS.
For George Sheldon the passing years had brought very little improvement of fortune.

He occupied his old dingy chambers in Gray's Inn, which had grown more dingy under the hand of Time; and he was wont to sit in his second-floor window on sultry summer Sundays, smoking his solitary cigar, and listening to the cawing of the rooks in the gardens beneath him, mingled with the voices of rebellious children, and shrill mothers threatening to "do for them," or to "flay them alive," in Somebody's Rents below.

The lawyer used to be quite meditative on those Sunday afternoons, and would wonder what sort of a fellow Lord Bacon was, and how he contrived to get into a mess about taking bribes, when so many other fellows had done it quietly enough before the Lord of Verulam's day, and even yet more quietly since--agreeably instigated thereto by the casuistry of Escobar.
Mr.Sheldon's prospects were by no means promising.

From afar off he beheld his brother's star shining steadily in the commercial firmament; but, except for an occasional dinner, he was very little the better for the stockbroker's existence.

He had reminded his brother very often, and very persistently, of that vague promise which the dentist had made in the hour of his adversity--the promise to help his brother if ever he did "drop into a good thing." But as it is difficult to prevent a man who is disposed to shuffle from shuffling out of the closest agreement that was ever made between Jones of the one part, and Smith of the other part, duly signed, and witnessed, and stamped with the sixpenny seal of infallibility, so is it still more difficult to obtain the performance of loosely-worded promises, uttered in the confidential intercourse of kinsmen.
In the first year of his married life Philip Sheldon gave his brother a hundred pounds for the carrying out of some grand scheme which the lawyer was then engaged in, and which, if successful, would secure for him a much larger fortune than Georgy's thousands.