She lifts the bottle, having uncorked it, to her lips and tastes. It has a deathly, sickly flavour, not enticing. Hesitating, she holds it in her hand, half-frightened, half-allured; while her heart beats loud and hard. "It is the key to all my doubts," she says within herself, looking steadfastly at it; "it is the answer to all my questions. If I do but drink this little draught, I shall have all knowledge; I shall never wonder again! I shall know where Jack is; I shall be with him! But shall I?" Ay, that's the rub! Even in this small world, to be alive at the same time with another person is not necessarily, or even probably, to be _with_ him. Wide continents, high mountains, deep rivers often sever those that are closest of kin; and in the world of the dead, which, being so much more populous, must be so much the greater, is it not likely that still wider continents, higher mountains, deeper rivers, may part two that would fain be together? What if, before her time, she incur the abasement of death, the dishonour of corruption, and yet attain not the object for whose sake she is willing desperately to lay her comely head in the dust? She changes her attitude, puts down the bottle, and again stoops her small flower-face on her bent fingers--her thoughts varying their channel a little: "If I go, I shall leave no gap behind me, any more than a teacupful of water taken out of a great pool leaves a gap behind. If it is disgraceful to go willingly out of the world, instead of being dragged unwillingly out of it, my disgrace is my own. I involve no one else in it; there is no one of my name left to be ashamed of me. I leave no work undone in the world. Hundreds of others can carry air-cushions, and read to a deaf old man far more patiently than I have done. My fifty pounds a year will go to put daily bread into some other poor woman's mouth, to whom it may perhaps taste sweeter than it has done to me." Her head sinks forward again on her outstretched arms.... "It is awful to go out into the dark all by oneself," she thinks, with a pang of intense self-pity, as she feels the warm, gentle life throbbing in her round, tender limbs: "and I, that hate the dark so----, is it very wicked of me to think of this thing? People will say so, but I will not hear them. Where shall I be to-morrow at even?" "You will be at Blessington, and feeling a good deal ashamed of your absurd paroxysm of cowardly despair," answers plain common sense, who, in the shape of an untold multitude of rats, begins rushing and gnawing, hundred-toothed, scampering hundred-footed behind the walls.