For a moment--one mad moment--Lauraine forgets all else save that she loves. Then she snatches herself away from those fierce-clasping arms and starts back, covering her crimson cheeks with her hands, while at her feet the cluster of roses falls, and lies unheeded. "Oh, Keith!" she sobs, terrified and dismayed. He recoils as if a blow had struck him. His eyes--_bad_ blue eyes, indeed, now--burn with eager light. A thousand mad, wild words rush to his lips, but he does not speak them. He is striving for an instant's self-command. "Forgive me," he says. "I--I forgot. You used to let me kiss you in the old days, you know." "The old days," she says, and her hands drop, and white and sad she stands before him, looking back at his face with agonized eyes. "I thought you had forgotten them long ago!" "Since your wedding-day, you mean?" he says bitterly. "No, Lauraine--I do not forget easily, and you are not the sort of woman a man can forget. Heaven knows, I tried hard enough. I did everything in my power to drive you out of my head those twelve months after your marriage. A black year that is to look back upon, Lauraine; and you gave it to me." "Oh, hush!" she says entreatingly; "you have no right to speak like this now, and I have no right to listen." "No right," he says, and all the rich, full music of his voice has grown hoarse and harsh with strong emotion. "I _have_ a right--every right. The right of loving you with the truest, fondest love man ever gave to woman. I never meant to meet you again--I never sought you; but Fate threw you in my way in Rome, and after all those weary months I--I could not help being glad of it. You--of course it was nothing to you: it never will be--you are so cold; you never cared for me as I for you, and now--oh, God--if you only knew _how_ I love you!" Lauraine shivers from head to foot. It is not his words, his reproaches, that fill her with so strange a dread--it is herself. She knows that she loves him as intensely and as uselessly as he loves her, and that before their two lives now stretches a broad black gulf they cannot cross or evade. She is quite speechless. The awful ordeal of that wedding-day comes back before her eyes, fresh and vivid as if it had been but yesterday. She knows she has committed a fatal error, but it is too late now to rectify it. Presently Keith speaks again.