"Keith is a strange character," says Lady Etwynde; "so headstrong and passionate, yet so loving and true; so wild, and yet so easily controlled; so selfish, and yet so weak. Lauraine has a great influence over him—more than any one else has, I think. I believe when once she made him see things in their true light, once she showed him that the love that would dishonour a woman is the last love worthy of her acceptance, he would turn from what even seemed her own tempting. But he must have known it could not be that."
"Lauraine is a good, true woman, though she has made a fatal mistake in life, and now it is too late to remedy it," says the Colonel regretfully. "What sad words those are, 'too late!' Just to have missed all that makes life desirable, just to meet and love, and find that Fate has placed an impassable barrier between you and that love. Ah, me!"
"Don't sigh!" whispers his wife tenderly. "Our 'too late' was just in time after all."
"Thank God for that!"
"I do," she answers fervently. "But how my own happiness makes me regret her loss! I never thought I could love any woman so dearly as I love Lauraine; and I feel, oh! so sorry for her now!"
"So do I—for Keith."
"And you think we can do nothing?"
"I fear not. It is a delicate matter. He may be only striving for forgetfulness after all. Men do foolish and desperate things sometimes for love's sake."
"That is one of the things we women who love you can't understand," says Lady Etwynde. "To us those excesses to which we are accused of driving you seem degrading and contemptible. We can only excuse sins that are not against ourselves, I suppose."
"Doubtless it looks cowardly," says her husband, "to fling away our self-respect because something has not been as we wished it; but then that something is worth everything else in the world, or we think so, and losing it, all else seems of no account."