"So you believed him?" interpolates Lady Etwynde. "Of course, man like, he—kept his promise?"
"Until—to-night," falters Lauraine. "When I saw him, when we met as we did, I cannot tell you how awful I felt. It was as if Fate had purposely thrown him across my path when I was most weak, and most unhappy."
"And what have you done?" asks Lady Etwynde, pityingly.
"I have sent him away—for ever!"
"Lauraine, had you strength—
"Oh," says Lauraine, with a little hysterical laugh, "we quarrelled desperately first. He said some dreadful things to me, and I—I don't know if I was not equally hard and unjust. But in any case it was better than sentiment—was it not? The next thing we shall hear is that he is going to marry Miss Anastasia Jane Jefferson."
"Lauraine, you are jesting!" exclaims Lady Etwynde. "What, that little American doll who 'guesses' and 'calculates,' and is only a few degrees better than Mrs. Bradshaw Woollffe? Impossible! I know she has a penchant for him—at least, it looked like it—but after loving you——"
"Oh, it will be 'moonlight after sunlight,'" says Lauraine, bitterly, "if I may copy Tennyson and say so. Why should he make a martyr of himself? I can be nothing to him, and it is all shame, and sin, and horror now. Oh, God! that I should live to say so—my darling boy——" A sob breaks from her. She thinks of Keith—bold, bright, debonnaire Keith, with his sunny smile and his bold, bright eyes that for her were always so soft and loving; Keith, with his merry ways and wild freaks, and steadfast, tender heart; Keith as he was, as he never again can be to her, in all the years to come!
"It is all my fault—mine!" she cries between her heavy sobs. "And I have made him so unhappy; and if he goes to the bad, if he gets wild and reckless, oh, what shall I do? How can I sit and bear my life, and look on his, as if it were nothing to me?"
Lady Etwynde kneels beside her and puts her arms round her in silence. "It will be hard, terribly hard," she says, tenderly. "But oh, my dear, you have had strength to do what was right to-day. You will have strength to bear the consequences."