Lauraine makes a sign to her maid to put on her wraps, and then follows her husband out to the carriage. He has not looked at her--he has not noticed one detail of the exquisite toilette--his voice in addressing her is harsh and impatient, and they have been married but two years. Yet the coldness and indifference she now receives is ten thousand times preferable, she thinks, to the frantic passion that he had once bestowed. He had been mad to have her, and he had won her! Now--well, now that infatuation looked as absurd as it had once been imperative. It is a man's nature; it always has been and always will be so. Lauraine too feels strangely changed. She seems to have grown cold, hard, indifferent to everything. These two years seem like ten. This is her first season in London since she married, and she looks upon it as a duty enforced, and with not one throb of pleasure or anticipation. She is young, rich, and very lovely; but she carries a heavy heart within that beautiful bosom, and knows that the one great error of her life is ever demanding compensation. Six months ago she and Keith Athelstone met again. He had gone back to New York after her marriage, to settle his affairs, and for eighteen months she had neither seen nor heard anything of him. When they met in Rome she had been startled and afraid of the change wrought in so brief a time. He looked years older. The bright, genial, sunny temper that had given him so great a charm was now sullen, uncertain, and bitter. He was restless, extravagant, and capricious. Much that she had heard of him pained and annoyed her deeply; but she scarcely dared remonstrate for fear of being met with a sneer or a reproach. Her husband took an unaccountable fancy to the young fellow, and had him constantly at their house; but it frightened Lauraine to see the hatred and contempt that at times flashed out in Keith's eyes and voice against the man who called him friend. No word of the past--no allusion to that wedding-morning of hers--ever passed between the young man and herself. She almost hoped he had forgotten his boyish passion--would be content to accept the friendship she had once proffered him, and he had rejected so scornfully. For herself nothing seemed to signify much now. The whole tenderness of her nature spent itself on her child. If she could have had her way, she would have liked to live in the quiet old Northumbrian house which was her husband's, and there given herself exclusively up to the care and teaching of her boy. But such a wild idea, was of course, scouted and ridiculed.