This evening they are both sitting by the open window overlooking the Rhine. In these hot summer nights Lauraine has cast aside her heavy black dresses, and wears chiefly white, with knots of black ribbon here and there. Lady Etwynde thinks how lovely she looks, sitting there, with the sunrays touching her dusky hair, her soft snowy gown, her slender hands that are idly folded on her lap. Instinctively she comes forward and kneels by her side. "Am I to go, Lauraine?" she asks, softly. For all answer Lauraine clasps her round the neck, and bursts into tears. "No, no; a thousand times no!" she cries, weeping. "You are the only one left to me to love. Don't leave me quite desolate." "I will not," answers Lady Etwynde, softly. "I wish I could be of some use--of some help; but in these cases the tenderest sympathy seems to hurt. No one can help us." "You speak as if you too had 'loved and lost'?" says Lauraine, wiping the tears from her eyes, and looking at the beautiful, noble face beside her. A faint warmth of colour comes over it; the proud head, with its golden halo of hair, droops a little. "Yes," she says, "I have. Sometimes I think it was my own fault, after all I was too proud, too exacting. Shall I tell you the story? Would you care to hear?" "Indeed, I would," said Lauraine, earnestly. "He was a soldier," begins Lady Etwynde. "I was seventeen; romantic to my finger-tips. He, thirty years or more; bronzed, bold, stalwart, a king among men, I always thought. We met at my first season in London, loved, were engaged. He was of good family, but not rich. My parents objected strongly at first; but I was their only child, and they had never crossed whim or wish of mine. Of course I gained my point. Oh, how happy I was! It was like all the ecstasy of dreams, all the fancies of poets, all the purity and waking passion of first love steeping my life in golden glamour. I only lived, watched, thought for him, and he--all the time--he deceived me!" Her voice breaks. The bitterness and anguish of that time seems present over again. The colour fades from her cheeks as she kneels there in the radiant moonlight.