Lady Etwynde only looks quietly at her for a moment. "I don't think you quite understand her," she says. "There may be natures that cannot find happiness in position, society, and--diamonds. Of course it is very odd that they should not do so, some sense or faculty must be wanting; but all the same, they do exist." "I hope she is not going to begin one of her lectures on culture," thinks Mrs. Douglas in inward perturbation. Aloud she says: "It is very awkward, Sir Francis not being here. And yachting about, like he is doing, perhaps he won't get the news for ever so long. Who has made all the arrangements?" "Lauraine," answers Lady Etwynde. "But how odd, how cold. Why does she not have some one--the clergyman, or the doctor?" "I don't think it is out of a mother's province to act as Lauraine is doing," answers Lady Etwynde, composedly. "My only regret is that she is so calm, so self-controlled. If she could only cry!" "Ah!" murmurs Mrs. Douglas, plaintively. "I told you she was so cold and hard. Even as a child she seldom cried." "Tears are no sign of deep feeling," says Lady Etwynde, sternly; "far otherwise. Some of the shallowest and most selfish people I have known, can cry for the least thing. Lauraine's grief is very terrible to me, because she will not give it natural outlet. I know what the child was to her." Mrs. Douglas looks at the fire, and is silent. She feels irritated, annoyed with Lauraine. Annoyed because she lets people see her unhappiness in the life chosen for her; annoyed because of her coldness and indifference towards herself. They have never had much in common; but since her marriage, since the suppression of that letter from Keith Athelstone, Lauraine has never been the same to her mother. "So ridiculous not to make the best of her position," she thinks, impatiently. "What on earth is the use of pretending to be a martyr? Perhaps now that she has lost the child she will think more of the father." The father! He is at that moment stretched on a pile of cushions on the deck of his yacht, the blue, rippling waters turned to silver in the moonrays, and his eyes gazing up at the liquid, brimming orbs of the Lady Jean. "Tired--with you?" he murmurs. "That could never be!" And his wife stands broken-hearted by the side of their little dead child! CHAPTER XV The body faints sore, It is tired in the race. Do you know Erlsbach? Very likely not. You won't find it in any map or guide-book, or directions to fashionable spas and watering-places. You won't find it by this name either, for its people call it differently. It is just a little dusky spot on the confines of the Austrian Tyrol, a little village shut in by pine forests washed by silvery waters; quaint, old world, unremarkable, but beautiful exceedingly.