"I wonder what I ought to do," she thinks. "Is it dangerous to go on with this? The case looks so different to just 'us two' to what it would, to an outsider. And though I might send him away now, we should be sure to meet again at some period or another. The world is never wide enough to part those who ought to be parted. And the poor fellow is so unhappy. No one understands him as I do. I know in books whenever there is anything of this sort, any danger, the two people always go into heroics, and part nobly, and have fearful sufferings to endure; but then in the third volume everything is sure to come right. If I thought, if I knew there would be a third volume in our lives... Ah, dear me, when do things ever come right in real life? Never, never, never." With a weary sigh that ends these thoughts she locks the letter away.
Far enough is she from guessing then what will soon put it and the writer out of her thoughts.
Meanwhile the Lady Etwynde is seriously disturbed and perplexed. She is too genuinely fond of Lauraine not to perceive that she has some inward trouble weighing on her mind, and yet she does not ask its nature, or even appear to notice it. She knows the girl is pure-minded, loyal, self-controlled; but so have been other women, who, beneath a sudden tempting—a fierce, wild, incomprehensible passion—have fallen from their high estate. And there is that in and about Lauraine that betrays that she could love very deeply, very passionately, with that absorption of herself into what she loves that is so dangerous a trait in any woman's character. To the weak, the placid, the prosaic, the cold, such a nature as this is quite incomprehensible. To the untempted it is so easy to be strong; to the cold, so easy to be virtuous. The conquest of self seems so possible when you have not to count the cost. To yourself? ah, no, not to yourself, but to one other who is all the world to you, and whose pain and sorrow intensify your own till the agony grows too much for human strength to bear.
Lady Etwynde had no personal experience to guide her through this maze of conclusions; but she had an immense amount of sympathy, and an infinite tenderness of nature. It pleased her to veil and deny this to the world at large, but it made her all the more beloved by the chosen few whom she neither could nor would deceive.
For Lauraine she had conceived a strong liking, not the mere pretty, gushing fancy that stands in lieu of friendship with so many women of the world; but an earnest and appreciative affection that would serve and stand by her all her life. She had a shrewd suspicion that all was not right with her; some care, some secret trouble, was preying on her mind, she felt assured.
"Perhaps, in time, she will tell me," she thinks to herself. "I hope she may. I might help her. Brooding over these things with one's self always makes them worse. What a woman can't talk of is bad for her. It eats into her heart and life, and absorbs all that is best in both. There is a disdain, a weariness about Lauraine unnatural in one so young. She loves her child, that one can see; but apart and aside from him she seems to have no life, no interest. Apathy, indifference, despair; those are not things that should be about her yet; but I know they are. And why?"
The dinner-bell sounds, and puts an end to her reflections, and she goes down the great oak staircase in her floating, artistic draperies, and, despite her beauty and her picturesqueness, actually has the bad taste to murmur
"What a comfort there are no men here!"