‘After all it is only the fortune he cares about,’ she said to herself, ‘and after my foolishness that night he fancies himself so secure of me that he can stay in London and enjoy life in his own way, and then come and claim me at the last moment, just in time to fulfil the conditions of his cousin’s will. He is making the most of his last year of liberty. He will have no more of me than the law obliges him to have. The year has nearly gone, and he has given me one little week of his society. A cool lover, certainly. A hypocrite, too, for he puts on looks and tones that seemed like deepest, strongest love. A gratuitous hypocrisy,’ pursued Laura, lashing herself to sharper scorn, ‘for I implored him to be frank with me. I offered him a loyal, friendly alliance. But he is a man, and I suppose it is man’s nature to be false. He preferred to declare himself my lover, forgetting that his conduct would belie his words. I will never forgive him. I will never forgive myself for being so easily deceived. The estate shall go to the hospital. If he were here to-morrow, kneeling at my feet, I would refuse him. I know the hollowness of his pretended love. He cannot fool me a second time.’ She had never been vain of her beauty. The secluded life she had led with her adopted father had left her simple as a cloistered nun in all her thoughts and habits. Edward Clare had told her that she was lovely, many times, and had praised her loveliness in his verses, with all the affectation, and some of the license of that new school of poets of which he was an obscure member; but Laura had received all such praises as the effervescence of the poet’s frothy intellect rather than as a just tribute to her charms. Now, full of anger against John Treverton, she looked in her glass one winter night and wondered if she were really beautiful. Yes, if the Guido in the dining-room below was beautiful--if features of purest modelling, dark hazel eyes, and a clear complexion faintly flushed with delicate carnation--if sculptured eyelids darkly fringed, a mouth half sad, half scornful, and dimples that showed momentarily in the mockery of a self-contemptuous smile--if these meant beauty, Laura Malcolm was assuredly beautiful. She was too true an artist not to know that this was beauty which smiled at her bitterly from the darkness of the glass. ‘Perhaps I am not his style,’ she said, with a little laugh. ‘I have heard Edward Clare say that of girls I have praised. “Yes, she is very well, but not my style,” as if Providence ought to have had him in view whenever it created a pretty woman. “Not my style,” Edward would drawl languidly, as much as to say, “and therefore a failure.”’ Every idea of John Treverton now remaining in Laura’s mind was a thought of bitterness. She was so angry with him that she could not give him credit for one worthy act or one honourable feeling. As nearly as a soul so generous could hate did she now approach to the sin of hatred.