"You are right. An outsider must always take a calmer and more dispassionate view of the matter; but I hope in time you will see him as he is. Once you were married, your lives lay apart. He should not have come near you, and, from your own account, he has broken all laws of honour, and put the selfishness of passion before everything that is good and honest and pure." "You are hard on him," says Lauraine, quietly. "You don't know him as I do. No one ever did seem to understand Keith but myself." "He is certainly no paragon of virtue," Lady Etwynde answers, contemptuously. "But, my darling, don't let us quarrel over him. He is a man, and I know what men are when they love. As for you, you have behaved nobly, despite your pain. Believe me, the thought will bring its own comfort in time, and--you say--he will never come back again?" "So he said." "Has he never said that before?" "Yes," answers Lauraine; "on my wedding-day." "I hope he will keep his word this time then," says Lady Etwynde. "He can do you no good, and he only makes your life more unhappy. My dear, be wise for the future, and avoid him." "That is my only wish now," answers Lauraine, rising from her low chair and passing her hand wearily across her aching brow. "And my only safety, too," she adds, in her own heart. But Lady Etwynde hears only the first sentence, and is glad of it and content. "He will not be faithful," she thinks, as she moves by Lauraine's side to her chamber on the next floor. "Men never are. So much life has taught me!" CHAPTER XVII "After a storm comes a calm."--It seemed as if a calm, the calm of a great despair had settled on Lauraine. All human love had passed out of her life; and that life itself looked grey, colourless as an autumn sky that has known no sunshine. But there was something in this dull stupor that kept the sharpness of pain in abeyance, that left her, to outward seeming, much the same as ever, and rejoiced Lady Etwynde's heart. "After all," she thinks to herself, "she could not have loved him so very much." She does not attempt to allude to the confidence of that night, nor does Lauraine return to it. Just for two or three days she watches with anxious eyes the arrival of the post: she is half fearful of a letter from Keith, a letter that will be a sort of blaze of anger, and upbraiding, like his own last words. But there comes neither letter nor sign. After a week or two Lauraine begins to get restless. "This is a place to sleep and dream in," she says to her friend; "I want to see some life again. Let us go to Baden or Monaco." Lady Etwynde is amazed. "Will Sir Francis object?" she asks. Lauraine smiles with faint contempt. "He never troubles himself about what I do," she says. "We will go, and if he objects, we can leave again!" Lady Etwynde yields, and they go to Baden.