The figure moves, turns half round. "It is like a poem," she says, softly. "Like it? One can hardly say that; one feels it." The speaker advances and joins her.
"Yes; you are right. I only came here once; it was years ago, and my heart was heavy with a great sorrow. I left it behind me, Lauraine; buried it amid the lonely woods and mountain ways. Oh, my dear, my dear, if you might do the same?"
A sigh parts the beautiful grave lips of Lauraine Vavasour; she grows very pale. "That cannot be," she says, faintly. "I could never forget easily; and this, this was part of my life—myself. Do not let us speak of it, Etwynde; it hurts me still."
"People say to talk of their troubles lightens them."
"I am not like that then. My sorrow is shut in my heart. I cannot bear to profane it with speech."
"But it makes it so much harder to bear, Lauraine."
"Not to me; nothing on earth, even your sympathy, could lighten it."
Lady Etwynde is silent. Her thoughts go back to that dreary, awful time when the child's death was yet so new a thing; it is nearly nine months ago now, and Lauraine has been all that time in the gloomy old mansion on the Northumbrian shores. The funeral had been long over before Sir Francis returned, and then he had made but a brief stay, and gone to Scotland with some friends.
"Fretting could do no good," he said philosophically, and he hated the gloomy quietude of Falcon's Chase, and was only too glad to leave it. Lady Etwynde stayed with Lauraine all through that dreary winter; she could not bear to leave her alone in her grief and despair, for the sorrow seemed but to take deeper root in her nature. Even all Lady Etwynde's gentle sympathy could make no way. She half-feared and only half-comprehended this new phase in her friend's character. For she could not know that Lauraine felt a terror of herself now; that it seemed to her as if the one safeguard she had clung to had been swept from her hold, and she lay anchorless, shelterless on the great dark sea of life, beholding no hope or ray of light, turn where she would.
The chill of winter passed into the fair, sweet month of spring; but no change came to her. Nothing seemed to thaw the ice about her heart. A strange chill and silence from the outer world rested upon her life as it was now. Of all her many friends and acquaintances none seemed to remember her or heed her. Keith had written again and yet again; she had never answered him once. She dared not. His sympathy, his presence would have been a comfort too great not to be dangerous, and the more she longed for them the more rigorously she denied them to herself. With the spring her husband wrote to know whether she wanted to come to town for the season. She read the letter with a shuddering horror. The season! To dance, drive, gossip, kill time in a round of empty pleasures; sate herself with luxury and extravagance. The thought seemed loathsome to her now. Her youth and all that was best in her seemed to have died with her little child. Her eyes seemed ever to have that look in them that has so frightened and pained her friend; the look as of tears that could not fall.