For a moment they stand silently there. At last Keith speaks. "I never meant to say such words to you again. I don't know what drove me mad to-night. The music, and that song, and your look combined. Oh! Lauraine, you can't love as I do, or you would not scruple to take happiness while it lay in your power. Life is so short, except for those who are miserable, and in all our lives we shall only drag on a wretched half-and-half existence. I know you are the one woman in the world for me, and I have lost you." "You may forget--in--time," falters Lauraine, her lips growing white at the pain of that thought, her whole soul wrung with the unutterable anguish of this coming parting. "You are very young, Keith, and have the world before you." "The world is not you," he answers, looking down from his tall height on the pale, sad face he loves so madly. "It is all nothingness and emptiness to me now. But you won't be too cruel to me, Lorry--you won't visit the sins of this evening too hardly on my head. Don't tell me we are never to meet or see each other. I can't live without a sight of you sometimes, and if you will only say you forgive me I promise not to offend in the same way again. I have kept silence all these months--I can do it again, and----" "Oh, Keith, don't tempt me like this," she entreats sorrowfully. "You know--you must know--that if we love each other we cannot be 'only' friends. It is not safe for either of us." "I shall not run away from you as if I were afraid," he says doggedly. "I do not care to live a day if I don't see you. Can't you trust me? can't you believe my word? To-night shall be buried and forgotten, unless--well, unless some happier fate awaits us in the future. We can be as we were, surely. There is no harm in that?" _No harm in that?_ Lauraine echoes the words in her heart. No harm--and with the memory of this scene in both their hearts, the thought of that passionate embrace, thrilling every pulse, the rapture of one mad moment ever at hand to repeat its tempting. No harm in it! A spasm of pain crosses her face. "Your own sense, your own feelings, ought to tell you that such a course is full of harm," she says faintly. "But, of course, I have no power to banish you. You accuse me of blighting your life, and I deserve the reproach. I should have been firmer--truer; but I did not think your love was so faithful, and in one weak moment I yielded to my mother's persuasions. The harm is done past all undoing, and--and now you wish to increase my unhappiness." "I wish to be nearer to you--to see you sometimes; that is all. Is it a great deal to ask, considering what I have suffered at your hands?" Lauraine knows it is only paltering with temptation--only leaping up fresh misery for herself and him in time to come, but still she hesitates; she is only a woman, and she loves.