"No; it would take a good time to make you thin, I imagine," Lauraine answers, with an involuntary glance at the splendid proportions of her old playmate. "So much the better. All men should be tall and well-made. Nature should establish it as a rule." "And all women beautiful, of course?" "Beauty is not the only attraction a woman need possess," Lauraine says thoughtfully. "I remember hearing some one remark once that the most beautiful women might win the greatest amount of admiration, but not the greatest love." "There is a class of beauty that can command both. Of course, there are women who are eaten up with the vanity and satisfaction of their own charms. To my thinking, no amount of personal loveliness could compensate for bad temper, ignorance, or self-conceit." "I think so too," Lauraine answers, meeting a sudden glance of the blue eyes, and colouring faintly beneath the warm admiration they speak. "But, as a rule, men go mad after a beautiful face, and don't trouble themselves about anything else beneath it." "I should never do that," Keith remarks quietly. "I like a woman for what is in her--not for the straight features, and fair complexion, and good eyes." "You are hard to please," Lauraine remarks, glancing down at her flowers. He makes her no answer whatever. There is a sudden hush now in the crowded rooms--a silence of expectation. Keith finds a seat for Lauraine on a low ottoman near one of the windows, and stands there beside her. The moon is shining clear and brilliant in the sky above, and streams over the quaint flower-beds and trees in the garden. The sweet sultry summer night is full of beauty and fragrance--it acts like a spell on the warm, imaginative temperament and ardent fancy of the young man. Across the silence a chord of music breaks. With his eyes still fixed on the garden and the sky, Keith Athelstone waits and listens. The voice of the great singer thrills across the rooms in that most exquisite of strains which Faust utters to his love. Lauraine's heart grows chill for a moment, then leaps up and beats with a sudden vivid emotion that fills her veins like fire, and holds her spell-bound to the end. In that moment it seems to her as if some revelation had come of all she has missed in life. The passionate music finds its way to her very soul, and holds in suspense life, thought, memory. There is a lull--a pause, and then a torrent of acclamation fills the air. The charm is snapped. The hands that hold the roses tremble visibly. She sits there and is silent, and does not look up at the face above her for answering sympathy, because of this strange dread and ecstasy he may read upon her own. He _has_ read it, despite the downcast eyes. He has read it, and his own heart grows rapturous with a sudden delight, and cold with as sudden a dread.