What, you won't?
Well, here's to your health, and a better taste to you!" And now, as the door once more closed upon Darvil, tears for the first time came to the relief of Alice.

It was a woman's weakness that procured for her that woman's luxury.

Those garments--they were Ernest's gift--Ernest's taste; they were like the last relic of that delicious life which now seemed to have fled for ever.

All traces of that life--of him, the loving, the protecting, the adored; all trace of herself, as she had been re-created by love, was to be lost to her for ever.

It was (as she had read somewhere, in the little elementary volumes that bounded her historic lore) like that last fatal ceremony in which those condemned for life to the mines of Siberia are clothed with the slave's livery, their past name and record eternally blotted out, and thrust into the vast wastes, from which even the mercy of despotism, should it ever re-awaken, cannot recall them; for all evidence of them--all individuality--all mark to distinguish them from the universal herd, is expunged from the world's calendar.