"No, you can't," says Keith rudely. "I have been so long away from fashionable society that I am afraid I shouldn't get on with your guests. But I am quite ready to have a chat with you, Mrs. Douglas, when you can favour me with your company. I think we have something besides news to discuss." "Most happy--delighted, I'm sure," answers Mrs. Douglas vaguely. "I will write and tell you what day, my dear Keith. So many engagements just now, you know." She sails out of the room, with Lauraine beside her. "Really, Keith has become quite American," she says complainingly. "So altered--so quite too coarse, and all that. It makes me shudder to hear him speak. He will be just like the Bradshaw Woollffes, I suppose. What a time you were with him, Lauraine--such bad form, you know! However, I am glad he's going. It would have been quite unpleasant if he had stayed." Lauraine draws her hand away from her mother's arm, and looks her steadily in the face. "You are right," she says, "it _would_." Mrs. Douglas feels anything but comfortable as she meets that cold gaze. But in her heart she says: "How fortunate that he did not come sooner--even yesterday!" She almost shudders as she thinks of the "slip" that might have been between the costly cup she had been occupied in raising, and the lips to which it had been successfully carried. "All is safe now, though," she thinks. "But how thankful I shall be when she is fairly off. Was ever such a wedding day as this?" And then she sails into her splendid rooms, and receives congratulations, and flutters about in graceful agitation, and feels that if ever a mother deserves the victor's crown of matrimonial success she deserves it. Of course all danger is over now. Do not all novels end with a wedding? Are not all Society's daughters considered settled and established once the ring is on, and the rice and slippers thrown? Still, as she looks at her daughter's face, an odd little uncomfortable feeling thrills her heart. There is something so strange, so _dead_-looking about bright, beautiful Lauraine. But she is married--safely married now. What is there to fear in the future, to regret in the past? Ay, _what_? CHAPTER IV