

E-text prepared by Joyce McDonald, Christine Bell, and Marc D'Hooghe
(http:www.girlebooks.com & http://www.freeliterature.org)



THE DOCTOR'S WIFE

A Novel

By the Author of
"Lady Audley's Secret," "Aurora Floyd"
Etc. Etc. Etc.







London
John and Robert Maxwell
Milton House, Shoe Lane, Fleet Street



CONTENTS.

    I. A young man from the country
    II. A sensation author
    III. Isabel
    IV. The end of George Gilbert's holiday
    V. George at home
    VI. Too much alone
    VII. On the bridge
    VIII. About poor Joe Tillet's young wife
    IX. Miss Sleaford's engagement
    X. A bad beginning
    XI. "She only said,'my life is weary!'"
    XII. Something like a birthday
    XIII. "Oh, my cousin, shallow-hearted!"
    XIV. Under Lord Thurston's oak
    XV. Roland says, "Amen"
    XVI. Mr. Lansdell relates an adventure
    XVII. The first warning
    XVIII. The second warning
    XIX. What might have been!
    XX. "Oceans should divide us!"
    XXI. "Once more the gate behind me falls"
    XXII. "My love's a noble madness"
    XXIII. A little cloud
    XXIV. Lady Gwendoline does her duty
    XXV. "For love himself took part against himself"
    XXVI. A popular preacher
    XXVII. "And now I live, and now my life is done!"
    XXVIII. Trying to be good.
    XXIX. The first whisper of the storm
    XXX. The beginning of a great change
    XXXI. Fifty pounds
    XXXII. "I'll not believe but Desdemona's honest"
    XXXIII. Keeping a promise
    XXXIV. Retrospective
    XXXV. "'Twere best at once to sink to peace"
    XXXVI. Between two worlds
    XXXVII. "If any calm, a calm despair"




THE DOCTORS WIFE.




CHAPTER I.

A YOUNG MAN FROM THE COUNTRY


There were two surgeons in the little town of
Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, in pretty pastoral Midlandshire,--Mr.
Pawlkatt, who lived in a big, new, brazen-faced house in the middle of
the queer old High Street; and John Gilbert, the parish doctor, who
lived in his own house on the outskirts of Graybridge, and worked very
hard for a smaller income than that which the stylish Mr. Pawlkatt
derived from his aristocratic patients.

John Gilbert was an elderly man, with a young son. He had married late
in life, and his wife had died very soon after the birth of this son. It
was for this reason, most likely, that the surgeon loved his child as
children are rarely loved by their fathers--with an earnest,
over-anxious devotion, which from the very first had been something
womanly in its character, and which grew with the child's growth. Mr.
Gilbert's mind was narrowed by the circle in which he lived. He had
inherited his own patients and the parish patients from his father, who
had been a surgeon before him, and who had lived in the same house, with
the same red lamp over the little old-fashioned surgery-door, for
eight-and-forty years, and had died, leaving the house, the practice,
and the red lamp to his son.

If John Gilbert's only child had possessed the capacity of a Newton or
the aspirations of a Napoleon, the surgeon would nevertheless have shut
him up in the surgery to compound aloes and conserve of roses, tincture
of rhubarb and essence of peppermint. Luckily for the boy, he was only a
common-place lad, with a good-looking, rosy face; clear grey eyes, which
stared at you frankly; and a thick stubble of brown hair, parted in the
middle and waving from the roots. He was tall, straight, and muscular; a
good runner, a first-rate cricketer, tolerably skilful with a pair of
boxing-gloves or single-sticks, and a decent shot. He wrote a fair
business-like hand, was an excellent arithmetician, remembered a
smattering of Latin, a random line here and there from those Roman
poets and philosophers whose writings had been his torment at a certain
classical and commercial academy at Wareham. He spoke and wrote
tolerable English, had read Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and
infinitely preferred the latter, though he made a point of skipping the
first few chapters of the great novelist's fictions in order to get at
once to the action of the story. He was a very good young man, went to
church two or three times on a Sunday, and would on no account have
broken any one of the Ten Commandments on the painted tablets above the
altar by so much as a thought. He was very good; and, above all, he was
very good-looking. No one had ever disputed this fact: George Gilbert
was eminently good-looking. No one had ever gone so far as to call him
handsome; no one had ever presumed to designate him plain. He had those
homely, healthy good looks which the novelist or poet in search of a
hero would recoil from with actual horror, and which the practical mind
involuntarily associates with tenant-farming in a small way, or the sale
of butcher's meat.

I will not say that poor George was ungentlemanly, because he had kind,
cordial manners, and a certain instinctive Christianity, which had never
yet expressed itself in any very tangible form, but which lent a genial
flavour to every word upon his lips, to every thought in his heart. He
was a very trusting young man, and thought well of all mankind; he was a
Tory, heart and soul, as his father and grandfather had been before him;
and thought especially well of all the magnates round about Wareham and
Graybridge, holding the grand names that had been familiar to him from
his childhood in simple reverence, that was without a thought of
meanness. He was a candid, honest, country-bred young man, who did his
duty well, and filled a small place in a very narrow circle with credit
to himself and the father who loved him. The fiery ordeal of two years'
student-life at St. Bartholomew's had left the lad almost as innocent as
a girl; for John Gilbert had planted his son during those two awful
years in the heart of a quiet Wesleyan family in the Seven-Sisters Road,
and the boy had enjoyed very little leisure for disporting himself with
the dangerous spirits of St. Bartholomew's. George Gilbert was
two-and-twenty, and in all the course of those two-and-twenty years
which made the sum of the young man's life, his father had never had
reason to reproach him by so much as a look. The young doctor was held
to be a model youth in the town of Graybridge; and it was whispered that
if he should presume to lift his eyes to Miss Sophronia Burdock, the
second daughter of the rich maltster, he need not aspire in vain. But
George was by no means a coxcomb, and didn't particularly admire Miss
Burdock, whose eyelashes were a good deal paler than her hair, and whose
eyebrows were only visible in a strong light. The surgeon was young, and
the world was all before him; but he was not ambitious; he felt no sense
of oppression in the narrow High Street at Graybridge. He could sit in
the little parlour next the surgery reading Byron's fiercest poems,
sympathizing in his own way with Giaours and Corsairs; but with no
passionate yearning stirring up in his breast, with no thought of revolt
against the dull quiet of his life.

George Gilbert took his life as he found it, and had no wish to make it
better. To him Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne was all the world. He had been
in London, and had felt a provincial's brief sense of surprised delight
in the thronged streets, the clamour, and the bustle; but he had very
soon discovered that the great metropolis was a dirty and disreputable
place as compared to Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne, where you might have
taken your dinner comfortably off any doorstep as far as the matter of
cleanliness is concerned. The young man was more than satisfied with his
life; he was pleased with it. He was pleased to think that he was to be
his father's partner, and was to live and marry, and have children, and
die at last in the familiar rooms in which he had been born. His nature
was very adhesive, and he loved the things that he had long known,
because they were old and familiar to him; rather than for any merit or
beauty in the things themselves.

The 20th of July, 1852, was a very great day for George Gilbert, and
indeed for the town of Graybridge generally; for on that day an
excursion train left Wareham for London, conveying such roving spirits
as cared to pay a week's visit to the great metropolis upon very
moderate terms. George had a week's holiday, which he was to spend with
an old schoolfellow who had turned author, and had chambers in the
Temple, but who boarded and lodged with a family at Camberwell. The
young surgeon left Graybridge in the maltster's carriage at eight
o'clock upon that bright summer morning, in company with Miss Burdock
and her sister Sophronia, who were going up to London on a visit to an
aristocratic aunt in Baker Street, and who had been confided to George's
care during the journey.

The young ladies and their attendant squire were in very high spirits.
London, when your time is spent between St. Bartholomew's Hospital and
the Seven-Sisters Road, is not the most delightful city in the world;
but London, when you are a young man from the country, with a week's
holiday, and a five-pound note and some odd silver in your pocket,
assumes quite another aspect. George was not enthusiastic; but he looked
forward to his holiday with a placid sense of pleasure, and listened
with untiring good humour to the conversation of the maltster's
daughters, who gave him a good deal of information about their aunt in
Baker Street, and the brilliant parties given by that lady and her
acquaintance. But, amiable as the young ladies were, George was glad
when the Midlandshire train steamed into the Euston Terminus, and his
charge was ended. He handed the Misses Burdock to a portly and rather
pompous lady, who had a clarence-and-pair waiting for her, and who
thanked him with supreme condescension for his care of her nieces. She
even went so far as to ask him to call in Baker Street during his stay
in London, at which Sophronia blushed. But, unhappily, Sophronia did not
blush prettily; a faint patchy red broke out all over her face, even
where her eyebrows ought to have been, and was a long time dispersing.
If the blush had been Beauty's bright, transient glow, as brief as
summer lightning in a sunset sky, George Gilbert could scarcely have
been blind to its flattering import; but he looked at the young lady's
emotion from a professional point of view, and mistook it for
indigestion.

"You're very kind, ma'am," he said. "But I'm going to stay at
Camberwell; I don't think I shall have time to call in Baker Street."

The carriage drove away, and George took his portmanteau and went to
find a cab. He hailed a hansom, and he felt as he stepped into it that
he was doing a dreadful thing, which would tell against him in
Graybridge, if by any evil chance it should become known that he had
ridden in that disreputable vehicle. He thought the horse had a rakish,
unkempt look about the head and mane, like an animal who was accustomed
to night-work, and indifferent as to his personal appearance in the day.
George was not used to riding in hansoms; so, instead of balancing
himself upon the step for a moment while he gave his orders to the
charioteer, he settled himself comfortably inside, and was a little
startled when a hoarse voice at the back of his head demanded "Where to,
sir?" and suggested the momentary idea that he was breaking out into
involuntary ventriloquism.

"The Temple, driver; the Temple, in Fleet Street," Mr. Gilbert said,
politely.

The man banged down a little trap-door and rattled off eastwards.

I am afraid to say how much George Gilbert gave the cabman when he was
set down at last at the bottom of Chancery Lane; but I think he paid for
five miles at eightpence a mile, and a trifle in on account of a
blockade in Holborn; and even then the driver did not thank him.

George was a long time groping about the courts and quadrangles of the
Temple before he found the place he wanted, though he took a crumpled
letter out of his waistcoat-pocket, and referred to it every now and
then when he came to a standstill.

Wareham is only a hundred and twenty miles from London; and the
excursion train, after stopping at every station on the line, had
arrived at the terminus at half-past two o'clock. It was between three
and four now, and the sun was shining upon the river, and the flags in
the Temple were hot under Mr. Gilbert's feet.

He was very warm himself, and almost worn out, when he found at last the
name he was looking for, painted very high up, in white letters, upon a
black door-post,--"4th Floor: Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund
Smith."

It was in the most obscure corner of the dingiest court in the Temple
that George Gilbert found this name. He climbed a very dirty staircase,
thumping the end of his portmanteau upon every step as he went up, until
he came to a landing, midway between the third and fourth stories; here
he was obliged to stop for sheer want of breath, for he had been lugging
the portmanteau about with him throughout his wanderings in the Temple,
and a good many people had been startled by the aspect of a well-dressed
young man carrying his own luggage, and staring at the names of the
different rows of houses, the courts and quadrangles in the grave
sanctuary.

George Gilbert stopped to take breath; and he had scarcely done so, when
he was terrified by the apparition of a very dirty boy, who slid
suddenly down the baluster between the floor above and the landing, and
alighted face to face with the young surgeon. The boy's face was very
black, and he was evidently a child of tender years, something between
eleven and twelve, perhaps; but he was in nowise discomfited by the
appearance of Mr. Gilbert; he ran up-stairs again, and placed himself
astride upon the slippery baluster with a view to another descent, when
a door above was suddenly opened, and a voice said, "You know where Mr.
Manders, the artist, lives?"

"Yes, sir;--Waterloo Road, sir, Montague Terrace, No. 2."

"Then run round to him, and tell him the subject for the next
illustration in the 'Smuggler's Bride.' A man with his knee upon the
chest of another man, and a knife in his hand. You can remember that?"

"Yes, sir."

"And bring me a proof of chapter fifty-seven."

"Yes, sir."

The door was shut, and the boy ran down-stairs, past George Gilbert, as
fast as he could go. But the door above was opened again, and the same
voice called aloud,--

"Tell Mr. Manders the man with the knife in his hand must have on
top-boots."

"All right, sir," the boy called from the bottom of the staircase.

George Gilbert went up, and knocked at the door above. It was a black
door, and the names of Mr. Andrew Morgan and Mr. Sigismund Smith were
painted upon it in white letters as upon the door-post below.

A pale-faced young man, with a smudge of ink upon the end of his nose,
and very dirty wrist-bands, opened the door.

"Sam!"

"George!" cried the two young men simultaneously, and then began to
shake hands with effusion, as the French playwrights say.

"My dear old George!"

"My dear old Sam! But you call yourself Sigismund now?"

"Yes; Sigismund Smith. It sounds well; doesn't it? If a man's evil
destiny makes him a Smith, the least he can do is to take it out in his
Christian name. No Smith with a grain of spirit would ever consent to be
a Samuel. But come in, dear old boy, and put your portmanteau down;
knock those papers off that chair--there, by the window. Don't be
frightened of making 'em in a muddle; they can't be in a worse muddle
than they are now. If you don't mind just amusing yourself with the
'Times' for half an hour or so, while I finish this chapter of the
'Smuggler's Bride,' I shall be able to strike work, and do whatever you
like; but the printer's boy is coming back in half an hour for the end
of the chapter."

"I won't speak a word," George said, respectfully. The young man with
the smudgy nose was an author, and George Gilbert had an awful sense of
the solemnity of his friend's vocation. "Write away, my dear Sam; I
won't interrupt you."

He drew his chair close to the open window, and looked down into the
court below, where the paint was slowly blistering in the July sun.




CHAPTER II.

A SENSATION AUTHOR.


Mr. Sigismund Smith was a sensation author. That bitter term of
reproach, "sensation," had not been invented for the terror of romancers
in the fifty-second year of this present century; but the thing existed
nevertheless in divers forms, and people wrote sensation novels as
unconsciously as Monsieur Jourdain talked prose. Sigismund Smith was the
author of about half-a-dozen highly-spiced fictions, which enjoyed an
immense popularity amongst the classes who like their literature as they
like their tobacco--very strong. Sigismund had never in his life
presented himself before the public in a complete form; he appeared in
weekly numbers at a penny, and was always so appearing; and except on
one occasion when he found himself, very greasy and dog's-eared at the
edges, and not exactly pleasant to the sense of smell, on the shelf of a
humble librarian and newsvendor, who dealt in tobacco and sweetstuff as
well as literature, Sigismund had never known what it was to be bound.
He was well paid for his work, and he was contented. He had his
ambition, which was to write a great novel; and the archetype of this
_magnum opus_ was the dream which he carried about with him wherever he
went, and fondly nursed by night and day. In the meantime he wrote for
his public, which was a public that bought its literature in the same
manner as its pudding--in penny slices.

There was very little to look at in the court below the window; so
George Gilbert fell to watching his friend, whose rapid pen scratched
along the paper in a breathless way, which indicated a dashing and
Dumas-like style of literature, rather than the polished composition of
a Johnson or an Addison. Sigismund only drew breath once, and then he
paused to make frantic gashes at his shirt-collar with an inky bone
paper-knife that lay upon the table.

"I'm only trying whether a man would cut his throat from right to left,
or left to right," Mr. Smith said, in answer to his friend's look of
terror; "it's as well to be true to nature; or as true as one can be,
for a pound a page--double-column pages, and eighty-one lines in a
column. A man would cut his throat from left to right: he couldn't do it
in the other way without making perfect slices of himself."

"There's a suicide, then, in your story?" George said, with a look of
awe.

"_A_ suicide!" exclaimed Sigismund Smith; "_a_ suicide in the
'Smuggler's Bride!' why, it teems with suicides. There's the Duke of
Port St. Martin's, who walls himself up alive in his own cellar; and
there's Leonie de Pasdebasque, the ballet-dancer, who throws herself out
of Count Caesar Maraschetti's private balloon; and there's Lilia, the
dumb girl,--the penny public like dumb girls,--who sets fire to herself
to escape from the--in fact, there's lots of them," said Mr. Smith,
dipping his pen in his ink, and hurrying wildly along the paper.

The boy came back before the last page was finished, and Mr. Smith
detained him for five or ten minutes; at the end of which time he rolled
up the manuscript, still damp, and dismissed the printer's emissary.

"Now, George," he said, "I can talk to you."

Sigismund was the son of a Wareham attorney, and the two young men had
been schoolfellows at the Classical and Commercial Academy in the
Wareham Road. They had been schoolfellows, and were very sincerely
attached to each other. Sigismund was supposed to be reading for the
Bar; and for the first twelve months of his sojourn in the Temple the
young man had worked honestly and conscientiously; but finding that his
legal studies resulted in nothing but mental perplexity and confusion,
Sigismund beguiled his leisure by the pursuit of literature.

He found literature a great deal more profitable and a great deal easier
than the study of Coke upon Lyttleton, or Blackstone's Commentaries; and
he abandoned himself entirely to the composition of such works as are to
be seen, garnished with striking illustrations, in the windows of humble
newsvendors in the smaller and dingier thoroughfares of every large
town. Sigismund gave himself wholly to this fascinating pursuit, and
perhaps produced more sheets of that mysterious stuff which literary
people call "copy" than any other author of his age.

It would be almost impossible for me adequately to describe the
difference between Sigismund Smith as he was known to the very few
friends who knew anything at all about him, and Sigismund Smith as he
appeared on paper.

In the narrow circle of his home Mr. Smith was a very mild young man,
with the most placid blue eyes that ever looked out of a human head, and
a good deal of light curling hair. He was a very mild young man. He
could not have hit any one if he had tried ever so; and if you had hit
him, I don't think he would have minded--much. It was not in him to be
very angry; or to fall in love, to any serious extent; or to be
desperate about anything. Perhaps it was that he exhausted all that was
passionate in his nature in penny numbers, and had nothing left for the
affairs of real life. People who were impressed by his fictions, and
were curious to see him, generally left him with a strong sense of
disappointment, if not indignation.

Was this meek young man the Byronic hero they had pictured? Was this the
author of "Colonel Montefiasco, or the Brand upon the Shoulder-blade?"
They had imagined a splendid creature, half magician, half brigand, with
a pale face and fierce black eyes, a tumbled mass of raven hair, a bare
white throat, a long black velvet dressing-gown, and thin tapering
hands, with queer agate and onyx rings encircling the flexible fingers.

And then the surroundings. An oak-panelled chamber, of course--black
oak, with grotesque and diabolic carvings jutting out at the angles of
the room; a crystal globe upon a porphyry pedestal; a mysterious
picture, with a curtain drawn before it--certain death being the fate of
him who dared to raise that curtain by so much as a corner. A
mantel-piece of black marble, and a collection of pistols and scimitars,
swords and yataghans--especially yataghans--glimmering and flashing in
the firelight. A little show of eccentricity in the way of household
pets: a bear under the sofa, and a tame rattlesnake coiled upon the
hearth-rug. This was the sort of thing the penny public expected of
Sigismund Smith; and, lo, here was a young man with perennial
ink-smudges upon his face, and an untidy chamber in the Temple, with
nothing more romantic than a waste-paper basket, a litter of old letters
and tumbled proofs, and a cracked teapot simmering upon the hob.

This was the young man who described the reckless extravagance of a
Montefiasco's sumptuous chamber, the mysterious elegance of a Diana
Firmiani's dimly-lighted boudoir. This was the young man in whose works
there were more masked doors, and hidden staircases, and revolving
picture-frames and sliding panels, than in all the old houses in Great
Britain; and a greater length of vaulted passages than would make an
underground railway from the Scottish border to the Land's End. This was
the young man who, in an early volume of poems--a failure, as it is the
nature of all early volumes of poems to be--had cried in passionate
accents to some youthful member of the aristocracy, surname unknown--

     "Lady Mable, Lady May, no paean in your praise I'll sing;
       My shattered lyre all mutely tells
     The tortured hand that broke the string.
       Go, fair and false, while jangling bells
     Through golden waves of sunshine ring;
       Go, mistress of a thousand spells:
     But know, midst those you've left forlorn,
       _One_, lady, gives you scorn for scorn."

"Now, George," Mr. Smith said, as he pushed away a very dirty inkstand,
and wiped his pen upon the cuff of his coat,--"now, George, I can attend
to the rights of hospitality. You must be hungry after your journey,
poor old boy! What'll you take?"

There were no cupboards in the room, which was very bare of furniture,
and the only vestiges of any kind of refreshment were a brown
crockery-ware teapot upon the hob, and a roll and pat of butter upon a
plate on the mantel-piece.

"Have something!" Sigismund said. "I know there isn't much, because, you
see, I never have time to attend to that sort of thing. Have some bread
and marmalade?"

He drew out a drawer in the desk before which he was sitting, and
triumphantly displayed a pot of marmalade with a spoon in it.

"Bread and marmalade and cold tea's capital," he said; "you'll try some,
George, won't you? and then we'll go home to Camberwell."

Mr. Gilbert declined the bread and marmalade; so Sigismund prepared to
take his departure.

"Morgan's gone into Buckinghamshire for a week's fishing," he said, "so
I've got the place to myself. I come here of a morning, you know, work
all day, and go home to tea and a chop or a steak in the evening. Come
along, old fellow."

The young men went out upon the landing. Sigismund locked the black door
and put the key in his pocket. They went down-stairs, and through the
courts, and across the quadrangles of the Temple, bearing towards that
outlet which is nearest Blackfriars Bridge.

"You'd like to walk, I suppose, George?" Mr. Smith asked.

"Oh, yes; we can talk better walking."

They talked a great deal as they went along. They were very fond of one
another, and had each of them a good deal to tell; but George wasn't
much of a talker as compared to his friend Sigismund. That young man
poured forth a perpetual stream of eloquence, which knew no exhaustion.

"And so you like the people at Camberwell?" George said.

"Oh yes, they're capital people; free and easy, you know, and no stupid
stuck-up gentility about them. Not but what Sleaford's a gentleman; he's
a barrister. I don't know exactly where his chambers are, or in what
court he practises when he's in town; but he _is_ a barrister. I suppose
he goes on circuit sometimes, for he's very often away from home for a
long time together; but I don't know what circuit he goes on. It doesn't
do to ask a man those sort of questions, you see, George; so I hold my
tongue. I don't think he's rich, that's to say not rich in a regular
way. He's flush of money sometimes, and then you should see the Sunday
dinners--salmon and cucumber, and duck and green peas, as if they were
nothing."

"Is he a nice fellow?"

"Oh yes; a jolly, out-spoken sort of a fellow, with a loud voice and
black eyes. He's a capital fellow to me, but he's not fond of company.
He seldom shows if I take down a friend. Very likely you mayn't see him
all the time you stay there. He'll shut himself up in his own room when
he's at home, and won't so much as look at you."

George seemed to be rather alarmed at this prospect.

"But if Mr. Sleaford objects to my being in the house," he began,
"perhaps I'd better--"

"Oh, he doesn't object, bless you!" Sigismund cried, hastily; "not a bit
of it. I said to Mrs. Sleaford the other morning at breakfast, 'A friend
of mine is coming up from Midlandshire; he's as good a fellow as ever
breathed,' I said, 'and good-looking into the bargain,'--don't you
blush, George, because it's spooney,--and I asked Mrs. S. if she could
give you a room and partially board you,--I'm a partial boarder, you
know,--for a week or so. She looked at her husband,--she's very sharp
with all of _us_, but she's afraid of _him_,--and Sleaford said yes; my
friend might come and should be welcome, as long as he wasn't bothered
about it. So your room's ready, George, and you come as my visitor; and
I can get orders for all the theatres in London, and I'll give you a
French dinner in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square every day of your
life, if you like; and we'll fill the cup of dissipation to the highest
top sparkle."

It was a long walk from the Temple to Camberwell; but the two young men
were good walkers, and as Sigismund Smith talked unceasingly all the
way, there were no awkward pauses in the conversation. They walked the
whole length of the Walworth Road, and turned to the left soon after
passing the turn-pike. Mr. Smith conducted his friend by mazy
convolutions of narrow streets and lanes, where there were pretty little
villas and comfortable cottages nestling amongst trees, and where there
was the perpetual sound of clattering tin pails and the slopping of
milk, blending pleasantly with the cry of the milkman. Sigismund led
George through these shady little retreats, and past a tall
stern-looking church, and along by the brink of a canal, till they came
to a place where the country was wild and sterile in the year 1852. I
dare say that railways have cut the neighbourhood all to pieces by this
time, and that Mr. Sleaford's house has been sold by auction in the form
of old bricks; but on this summer afternoon the place to which Sigismund
brought his friend was quite a lonely, countrified spot, where there was
one big, ill-looking house, shut in by a high wall, and straggling rows
of cottages dwindling away into pigsties upon each side of it.

Standing before a little wooden door in the wall that surrounded Mr.
Sleaford's garden, George Gilbert could only see that the house was a
square brick building, with sickly ivy straggling here and there about
it, and long narrow windows considerably obscured by dust and dirt. It
was not a pleasant house to look at, however agreeable it might be as a
habitation; and George compared it unfavourably with the trim
white-walled villas he had seen on his way,--those neat little mansions
at five-and-thirty pounds a year; those cosy little cottages, with
shining windows that winked and blinked in the sunshine by reason of
their cleanliness; those dazzling brass plates, which shone like brazen
shields upon the vivid green of newly-painted front doors. If Mr.
Sleaford's house had ever been painted within Mr Sleaford's memory, the
