e my life, so that you may not absolutely starve when I die."
Having said this, Mr Vavasor went away, not immediately to the
insurance office, as his words seemed to imply, but to his club where
he sat alone, reading the newspaper, very gloomily, till the time
came for his afternoon rubber of whist, and the club dinner bill for
the day was brought under his eye.

Alice had no such consolations in her solitude. She had fought her
battle with her father tolerably well, but she was now called upon
to fight a battle with herself, which was one much more difficult to
win. Was her cousin, her betrothed as she now must regard him, the
worthless, heartless, mercenary rascal which her father painted him?
There had certainly been a time, and that not very long distant, in
which Alice herself had been almost constrained so to regard him.
Since that any change for the better in her opinion of him had been
grounded on evidence given either by himself or by his sister Kate.
He had done nothing to inspire her with any confidence, unless his
reckless daring in coming forward to contest a seat in Parliament
could be regarded as a doing of something. And he had owned himself
to be a man almost penniless; he had spoken of himself as being
utterly reckless,--as being one whose standing in the world was and
must continue to be a perch on the edge of a precipice, from which
any accident might knock him headlong. Alice believed in her heart
that this last profession or trade to which he had applied himself,
was becoming as nothing to him,--that he received from it no certain
income;--no income that a man could make to appear respectable to
fathers or guardians when seeking a girl in marriage. Her father
declared that all men spoke badly of him. Alice knew her father to be
an idle man, a man given to pleasure, to be one who thought by far
too much of the good things of the world; but she had never found him
to be either false or malicious. His unwonted energy in this matter
was in itself evidence that he believed himself to be right in what
he said.

To tell the truth, Alice was frightened at what she had done, and
almost repented of it already. Her acceptance of her cousin's
offer had not come of love;--nor had it, in truth, come chiefly of
ambition. She had not so much asked herself why she should do this
thing, as why she should not do it,--seeing that it was required
of her by her friend. What after all did it matter? That was her
argum