The reverend Horatio took his seat at the right of the master; and, without a spark of interest, watched the pale hand busy among the decanters fill his beaker. He would, indeed, have preferred not to put his lips to it, had the exigencies of the social moment but permitted it, so utterly had that smile of David’s turned its flavour for him. “By George!” exclaimed the colonel, flinging himself luxuriously back in his chair and speaking with the enthusiasm of an experienced sensualist, “by George, a glorious tipple! Enough to turn the whitest-livered cur into a hero! Come, come, gentlemen, we must not let such grape juice run down our throats unconsecrate, as if we were beasts. Let us dedicate every drop of it.—A toast, a toast!” He had reached that agreeable state which should be the aim of the expert diner at this crucial moment of the repast. He had eaten well and had drunk wisely; and was now on the fine border line where the utmost enjoyment of the sober man merges into the first elevation of spirit of the slightly intoxicated. “I propose our amiable host,” he went on, just as Herrick, springing to his feet and raising his glass exclaimed: “There can be here but one worthy toast—the fair ones of Bindon.” “Our Queens, our Goddesses, our Nymphs, our Angels!” interrupted Villars, with his usual inspiration. “Our fair ones!” echoed David, rising also; “indeed nothing could be more just than that we should devote the blood wrung from the grape that makes, as Colonel Harcourt truly says, heroes of mankind, to woman, that other spring of all our noble actions. Is it not so, my gallant Colonel?” “Hear him, hear!” cried innocent Herrick, beating the table with an excited hand. David’s glacial eye fell for a moment on the hot boy-face, and there flickered in it a kind of faint pity. So, one might fantastically fancy, would a spirit recently rent from the body by an agonising death, look from its own corpse upon those who had yet to die. “Let us drink,” said David, and raised his glass, “to Woman! Without her what should we know of ourselves, of our friends, of the treasures of the human heart and the nobility of the human mind, of honour, of purity, of faithfulness!” Dr. Tutterville looked up at the speaker, resting his hand on the table in the attitude of one prepared to spring forward in an emergency. As David’s voice rang out ever more incisive he was reminded of the breaking of sheets of ice under the stress of dark waters below.