"I hope he will keep his word this time then," says Lady Etwynde. "He can do you no good, and he only makes your life more unhappy. My dear, be wise for the future, and avoid him."
"That is my only wish now," answers Lauraine, rising from her low chair and passing her hand wearily across her aching brow. "And my only safety, too," she adds, in her own heart.
But Lady Etwynde hears only the first sentence, and is glad of it and content.
"He will not be faithful," she thinks, as she moves by Lauraine's side to her chamber on the next floor. "Men never are. So much life has taught me!"
CHAPTER XVII
"After a storm comes a calm."—It seemed as if a calm, the calm of a great despair had settled on Lauraine. All human love had passed out of her life; and that life itself looked grey, colourless as an autumn sky that has known no sunshine. But there was something in this dull stupor that kept the sharpness of pain in abeyance, that left her, to outward seeming, much the same as ever, and rejoiced Lady Etwynde's heart.
"After all," she thinks to herself, "she could not have loved him so very much."
She does not attempt to allude to the confidence of that night, nor does Lauraine return to it. Just for two or three days she watches with anxious eyes the arrival of the post: she is half fearful of a letter from Keith, a letter that will be a sort of blaze of anger, and upbraiding, like his own last words. But there comes neither letter nor sign.
After a week or two Lauraine begins to get restless.