He paces to and fro his rooms--the rooms Lauraine's judgment and choice has selected and furnished--luxurious apartments that look out on St. James's Park. The radiance of the early summer dawn--beautiful even in a great city--is over all the sky. A faint breeze rustles the trees--the birds sing and chirp among boughs that are moist with the night's rain, just some tender freshening shower that had fallen scarce an hour before. Those young tired eyes of Keith Athelstone's look out on it all, and a sigh parts his lips. "There are so many women in the world," he mutters, as he ceases his restless pacing, and leans against the open window. "So many that are beautiful and young, and easy to win, and yet all my life is but a longing for one who can be nothing to me. How hard fate is!" The cool, fresh air blows over his brow, but it does not still its aching. His whole soul is hardened, and bitterly ashamed. He has gained his will, he has forced Lauraine to say "_Stay_," but all the same his triumph brings no satisfaction. That she loves him he knows, but she is not a woman to lend herself to the base frailties of a lax morality, to sink to the low level that pursues its joys in secret, and smiles serenely on the face of society at large. There would be no playing at innocence with her, and she was too proud as well as too passionate not to suffer intensely in the struggle. And then, after all, how would it end--how do these poor pretences ever end? The barrier is so frail--a look, a word, a chance meeting, and it is overthrown, and then---- He springs impetuously to his feet here. He dares not pursue that train of thought any further. "I won't think of the end," he mutters. "I shall see her still, and sufficient unto the day is the--evil--thereof!" The evil? Might it come to that for Lauraine, and for himself! "My dear," says Lady Etwynde to Lauraine, as she sits in the boudoir of the latter, "your roses looked charming; there was something so simple and artistic in that arrangement; not like a regular florist's bouquet. But why did you leave them in the garden? I found them lying on the grass when I walked there this morning, and as I love roses, though they have not the subtle meaning of our own peculiar flowers, I brought them in and put them in water." Lauraine flushes hotly, and then grows as suddenly pale. "I--I dropped them, I suppose," she says, bending over some crewels she is sorting. "It is of no consequence. I get so many flowers." Lady Etwynde glances quickly at the beautiful, troubled face. She has taken a warm liking to Lauraine, and when alone with her drops all her fantastic ways and conversation. She leans back now in her low chair, and looks long and thoughtfully at her friend. "I had not much time to speak to you last night," she says presently; "and you left so suddenly. I was afraid you were ill."