"the French wine."

"And nothing else?"

The waiter ventured on a little joke. "Nothing else," he said--"and
more than enough of it, too."

"Not more than enough, I suppose, for the good of the house," Mrs.
Vimpany remarked.

"I beg your pardon, ma'am; the claret the two gentlemen drank is not
charged for in the bill."

"What do you mean?"

The waiter explained that Mr. Mountjoy had purchased the whole stock of
the wine. Suspicion, as well as surprise, appeared in Mrs. Vimpany's
face. She had hitherto thought it likely that Miss Henley's
gentleman-like friend might be secretly in love with the young lady.
Her doubts of him, now, took a wider range of distrust. She went on up
the stairs by herself, and banged the door of the private room as the
easiest means of waking the sleeping man. To the utmost noise that she
could make in this way, he was perfectly impenetrable. For a while she
waited, looking at him across the table with unutterable contempt.

There was the man to whom the religion of the land and the law of the
land, acting together in perfect harmony, had fettered her for life!
Some women, in her position, might have wasted time in useless
self-reproach. Mrs. Vimpany reviewed her miserable married life with
the finest mockery of her own misfortune. "Virtue," she said to