either for him or for herself. And now that she was married
there was no thoughtfulness, or care either for herself or for her
husband. She was ready to sacrifice herself for him, if any sacrifice
might be required of her. She believed herself to be unfit for him,
and would have submitted to be divorced,--or smothered out of the
way, for the matter of that,--if the laws of the land would have
permitted it. But she had never for a moment given to herself the
task of thinking what conduct on her part might be the best for his
welfare.

But Alice's love had been altogether of another kind,--and I am by no
means sure that it was better suited for the work of this work-a-day
world than that of her cousin. It was too thoughtful. I will not
say that there was no poetry in it, but I will say that it lacked
romance. Its poetry was too hard for romance. There was certainly
in it neither fun nor wickedness; nor was there, I fear, so large
a proportion of hero-worship as there always should be in a girl's
heart when she gives it away. But there was in it an amount of
self-devotion which none of those near to her had hitherto
understood,--unless it were that one to whom the understanding of it
was of the most importance. In all the troubles of her love, of her
engagements, and her broken promises, she had thought more of others
than of herself,--and, indeed, those troubles had chiefly come from
that self-devotion. She had left John Grey because she feared that
she would do him no good as his wife,--that she would not make him
happy; and she had afterwards betrothed herself for a second time to
her cousin, because she believed that she could serve him by marrying
him. Of course she had been wrong. She had been very wrong to give up
the man she did love, and more wrong again in suggesting to herself
the possibility of marrying the man she did not love. She knew that
she had been wrong in both, and was undergoing repentance with very
bitter inward sackcloth. But she said little of all this even to her
cousin.

They went to Lucerne by Basle, and put up at the big hotel with the
balcony over the Rhine, which Alice remembered so well. On the first
evening of her arrival she found herself again looking down upon the
river, as though it might have been from the same spot which she had
occupied together with George and Kate. But, in truth, that house is
very large, and has many bedrooms over the water. Who has ever been
through Basle, an