In her quieter moods--the moods she dreaded most--she allowed her mind to dwell on the past. She wondered what John was doing and where he was. Had he succeeded or had he failed? For a long time she had received no word. On leaving Mrs. Farley's, she had left no address and had taken no pains to have her mail forwarded. No doubt his letters had been returned to him. Sometimes she regretted having burned the message of farewell which Brockton had dictated. It would have been fairer, more honest, to have told him the truth frankly. Brockton had wanted to do the right thing, and she had lied, making him believe she had done it. That was why she despised herself, and that was why she drank champagne--so she might forget. Sometimes she took too much. One night Elfie St. Clair celebrated her birthday by giving a supper in her apartment. It was a jolly gathering, and they made merry until the late hours of the morning. Laura had been particularly high spirited and hilarious until, toward the end, her face grew deathly white. Seized with a sudden dizziness, she had to be wrapped in furs and carried down to her carriage. Brockton, embarrassed, declared it to be due to the heat. Everybody present knew it was the champagne. But gaiety that is forced and only artificially stimulated cannot be kept up long. One day the reaction inevitably comes, and then the awakening is terrible, disastrous. At times, when, in company of others, she was laughing loudly and appearing to be thoroughly enjoying herself, she would suddenly become serious, talk no more, and go away in the corner by herself. Her companions teased her about it, and called such symptoms "Laura's tantrums." The truth was that each day the girl realized more the hollowness and rottenness of the life she was leading. She was filled with repulsion and disgust, both for herself and her associates. While she was weak and luxury-loving, she was not entirely devoid of character. There was enough sentimentality and emotion in her moral fibre to make her see the impossibility of continuing to live this irregular, vicious kind of existence. Women of Elfie St. Clair's type could do it, because they had no innate refinement of feeling, but she could not, and, in her saner moments, when she thought of what she had lost, when she remembered how she had been regenerated, purified, by her disinterested love for a good man, she looked wistfully back on those weeks at Mrs. Farley's boarding-house. Her attic, miserable as it was, was a haven of happiness and respectability compared with her present degradation.