licly known he
might be shunned for the deceit he had displayed; and he easily obtained
Annie's glad consent to fix their residence for a few years in Paris.
Irritated as in all probability he was, when he found himself again
fettered, yet he so ably concealed this irritation, that his wife
suspected it not, and for a time she was happy.

As Lord and Lady Alphingham are no longer concerned in our tale, having
nothing more in common with those in whom, we trust, our readers are
much more interested, we may here formally dismiss them in a few words.
They lived, but if true happiness dwells only with the virtuous and
good, with the upright and the noble, it gilded not their lot; but if
those who are well acquainted with the morality of the higher classes of
the French capital can pronounce that it dwells there, then, indeed,
might they be said to possess it, for such was their lives. They
returned not again to England, but lived in France and Italy,
alternately. Alphingham, callous to every better and softer feeling,
might have been happy, but not such was the fate of Annie. Bitterly, ere
she died, did she regret her folly and disobedience; remorse was
sometimes busy within, though no actual guilt dimmed her career: she
drowned the voice of conscience in the vortex of frivolity and fashion.
But the love she bore for Alphingham was the instrument of retribution,
her husband neglected, despised, and frequently deserted her. Let no
woman unite herself with sin, in the vain hope of transforming it to
virtue. Such thoughts had not, indeed, been Annie's, when wilfully she
sought her fate. She knew not the man she had chosen for her husband;
she disregarded the warnings she had heard. Fatal delusion! she found,
too late, the fate her will had woven was formed of knotty threads, the
path that she had sought beset with thorns, from which she could not
break. No children blessed her lot, and it was better thus--for they
would have found but little happiness. The fate of Lord Alphingham's
child, the little Agnes, was truly happy in her own innocence; she lived
on for many years in ignorance of her real rank and the title of her
father, under the careful guidance of that relative to whom her mother's
last words had tenderly consigned her.

Mr. and Mrs. Hamilton remained but little longer in town; Caroline's
_trousseau_ was quite completed, for but very few weeks now intervened
ere her marriage. Lady Gertrude had devoted herself to th