And she laughs again: soft, amused, pleasant laughter, that seems to hold no malice, to be the outspring of no evil thought. And all the time her heart is full of both. For, as virtue shames vice, and purity shows up the grosser contrast of immorality, so she feels ashamed and rebuked by the words and presence of Lauraine. "If ever two people loved, they love," she had said to herself that past season; and now it had all come to nothing. There was no hold over Lauraine, no _petite histoire_, nothing to smile and sneer at. "If she had only compromised herself ever so little," she thinks to-night as she looks at the lovely calm face, the grave dark eyes. "And now this projected marriage. It is awfully queer. If she had been like other women." CHAPTER XX "The old place is just the same, isn't it?" says one tall bearded man to another, as they stand at the window of the Naval and Military Club, and look out at the lighted streets in the grey November dusk. The man addressed turns his keen dark eyes on his companion's face. "The same--yes, I suppose it is. It's only people who change, you know. Places and things haven't their excuse." "Well, changed or not, I'm glad to be back again," says Major Trentermain of the Twelfth. He and his friend, Colonel Carlisle, have just returned from Burmah, and are enjoying the comforts of club-life, the reunion with old friends, the hundred-and-one things that, familiar enough once, have become of double value since sacrificed for the exigencies of foreign service, and lost through years of hard work and fierce warfare, and the myriad discomforts of climate and life abroad. "London is the best place in the world to enjoy life in," continues Trentermain. "I've been looking up old friends to-day. Such welcomes! Didn't expect to find so many in town. But the country's beastly just now; even the hunting's spoilt by the weather." "Old friends," echoes his companion drearily. "I wonder if I've got any left. I feel like a Methuselah come back; it seems a lifetime since I went abroad." He passes his hand over his short-cut iron-grey hair, and half sighs. He is a splendid-looking man. Tall, erect, powerful, with keen dark eyes and a heavy drooping moustache, dark still in contrast to his hair--a man who carries his forty-five years lightly enough, despite hard service and trying climate. His eyes gaze out on the darkening streets, where the lamps are shining, and his thoughts go back to some thirteen years before, to a time of fierce joy and fiercer suffering. "I wonder where _she_ is now?" he thinks to himself. "Pshaw! married, of course, long ago. I wonder I have not forgotten her. Thirteen years of such a life as mine ought to knock all memories and romance out of one." He laughs a little bitterly and impatiently, and then plunges into a discussion with his friend, which resolves itself into an arrangement to dine and go to the theatre together afterwards.