"The old days," she says, and her hands drop, and white and sad she stands before him, looking back at his face with agonized eyes. "I thought you had forgotten them long ago!"
"Since your wedding-day, you mean?" he says bitterly. "No, Lauraine—I do not forget easily, and you are not the sort of woman a man can forget. Heaven knows, I tried hard enough. I did everything in my power to drive you out of my head those twelve months after your marriage. A black year that is to look back upon, Lauraine; and you gave it to me."
"Oh, hush!" she says entreatingly; "you have no right to speak like this now, and I have no right to listen."
"No right," he says, and all the rich, full music of his voice has grown hoarse and harsh with strong emotion. "I have a right—every right. The right of loving you with the truest, fondest love man ever gave to woman. I never meant to meet you again—I never sought you; but Fate threw you in my way in Rome, and after all those weary months I—I could not help being glad of it. You—of course it was nothing to you: it never will be—you are so cold; you never cared for me as I for you, and now—oh, God—if you only knew how I love you!"
Lauraine shivers from head to foot. It is not his words, his reproaches, that fill her with so strange a dread—it is herself. She knows that she loves him as intensely and as uselessly as he loves her, and that before their two lives now stretches a broad black gulf they cannot cross or evade.
She is quite speechless. The awful ordeal of that wedding-day comes back before her eyes, fresh and vivid as if it had been but yesterday. She knows she has committed a fatal error, but it is too late now to rectify it. Presently Keith speaks again.
"I think you have spoilt my whole life," he says. "Thought drives me mad, or to distractions that are ruinous to body and soul. I feel as if I cannot bear to live as I do. Why," he continues passionately, "do you know, I never stand alone on a moonlight night, or look at any beauty in nature or in art, or see the stars shining in the sky, but I long and long till longing drives me desperate for just your presence beside me, your voice on my ear. I never hear a strain of music that touches my soul but I long to turn to you for answering sympathy. I am young and rich, and have life and the world before me, and yet there is no single thing I can enjoy with any real heart-whole enjoyment now. There is always the one want that drives me desperate—the one craving for you!"
Lauraine listens to the torrent of his words, and all her soul seems rent and shaken. In the old days, the old boy and girl days together, she had never loved Keith Athelstone as she loves him now, and that thought terrifies her with a sense of her own wickedness and an awful dread of the ordeal before her.
"I am sorry—so sorry," she says tremulously. "I did hope you had got over it—had forgotten—
"Forgotten!" interrupts Keith bitterly. "No; I leave that for women."