Alice had taken the bracelet-box in her hands as Lady Sarah spoke; when they had departed, she carried it upstairs to its place in Lady Sarah's bedroom. The colonel speedily rose from table, for his wife had laid her commands on him to join them early. Alice helped him to his tea, and as soon as he was gone she went upstairs to bed. To bed, but not to sleep. Tired as she was, and exhausted in frame, sleep would not come to her. She was living over again her interview with Gerard Hope. She could not, in her conscious heart, affect to misunderstand his implied meaning--that she had been the cause of his rejecting the union proposed to him. It diffused a strange rapture within her; and, though she had not perhaps been wholly blind and unconscious during the period of Gerard's stay with them, and for some time before that, she now kept repeating the words, "Can it be that he loves me? can it be?" It certainly was so. Love plays strange pranks. There was Gerard Hope--heir to the colonel's fabulous wealth, consciously proud of his handsome person, his height and strength--called home and planted down by the side of a pretty and noble lady on purpose that he might fall in love with her: the Lady Frances Chenevix. And yet, the well-laid project failed: failed because there happened to be another at that young lady's side: a sad, quiet, feeble-framed girl, whose very weakness may have seemed to others to place her beyond the pale of man's love. But love thrives by contrasts; and it was the feeble girl who won the love of the strong man. Yes; the knowledge diffused a strange rapture within her, Alice Dalrymple, as she lay that night; and she may be excused if, for a brief period, she allowed range to the sweet fantasies it conjured up. For a brief period only. Too soon the depressing consciousness returned to her, that these thoughts of earthly happiness must be subdued: for she, with her confirmed ailments and conspicuous weakness, must never hope to marry, as did other women. She had long known--her mother had prepared her for it--that one so afflicted and frail as she, whose tenure of existence was likely to be short, ought not to become a wife; and it had been her earnest hope to pass through life unloving, in that one sense, and unloved. She had striven to arm herself against the danger, against being thrown into the perils of temptation. Alas! it had come insidiously upon her; all her care had been set at naught; and she knew that she loved Gerard Hope with a deep and fervent love. "It is but another cross," she sighed, "another burden to surmount and subdue, and I will set myself from this night to the task. I have been a coward, shrinking from self-examination; but now that Gerard has spoken out, I can deceive myself no longer. I wish he had spoken more freely, that I might have told him it was useless."