To feel the arms of my true love
Round me once again!
No one has been more astonished at the news of Keith Athelstone's engagement than Lady Etwynde. It comes to her in a letter from Lauraine—a cold and strangely written letter, yet one which has caused the writer terrible pangs.
When they left Baden they had gone to Falcon's Chase, and entertained a large house party there. After Christmas Lauraine was coming to London. She was not strong, and the cold, bleak air of the north tried her severely. All this Lady Etwynde learnt by letters—letters that seemed curt and constrained—that in no way revealed anything of that inner life, those secret springs of feelings which she had learned to read and gauge in the confidences of that past summer.
She is sitting alone in her room that is like a cameo in the soft November dusk of the closing day. It is some three days since her reception and the meeting with Colonel Carlisle. She is thinking she will write and tell Lauraine about it, and then again she thinks she had better not. In this state of indecision she is disturbed by the entrance of one of the æsthetically-clad damsels of her household.
"Do you receive, my lady?" she asks, presenting her with a card.
Lady Etwynde glances at it, then blushes hotly.
"Yes," she says, turning away so that her tell-tale face may not be noticed. She feels half ashamed, half glad. The name on the card is "Colonel Carlisle."
She is dressed to-day in olive-green velvet, with touches of old yellow lace about the throat and wrists; the golden hair is coiled loosely about her beautifully shaped head, and waves in softly tangled curls and ripples above her brow. She looks very lovely, and her visitor's eyes tell her so as he bows over her slender white hand, and murmurs conventional greeting.
"I am glad to find you at home," he says.
"It is not my day," she answers, smiling up at the tall figure. "But perhaps you won't object to that. You would have found a crowd here had it been."