Five minutes later, Mountjoy (standing at the window, impatiently on

the watch for the return of Iris) saw Mrs. Vimpany in the street. She

entered a chemist's shop, on the opposite side of the way, and came out

again with a bottle in her hand. It was enclosed in the customary

medical wrapping of white paper. Majestically, she passed out of sight.

If Hugh had followed her he would have traced the doctor's wife to the

door of the inn.

The unemployed waiter was on the house-steps, looking about him--with

nothing to see. He made his bow to Mrs. Vimpany, and informed her that

the landlady had gone out.

"You will do as well," was the reply. "Is Mr. Vimpany here?"

The waiter smiled, and led the way through the passage to the foot of

the stairs. "You can hear him, ma'am." It was quite true; Mr. Vimpany's

snoring answered for Mr. Vimpany. His wife ascended the first two or

three stairs, and stopped to speak again to the waiter. She asked what

the two gentlemen had taken to drink with their dinner. They had taken

"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

herself, "is its own reward."




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