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 marker.
Having culminated to that, he wrote and proposed marriage to Miss Dale, in a charming letter: she showed it to her father with pride.
Now, if his vanity, his disloyalty, his falsehood, his ingratitude, and his other virtues had not stood in the way, he would have done this three years ago, and been jumped at.
But the offer came too late; not for Phoebe--she would have taken him in a moment--but for her friends.