"I was wrong, I suppose," she says, slowly. "A woman who loves must forget _herself_ in that love, and I, I thought too much of my wounded pride, my lost ideal. But I have never held a thought of love for any other man. The lips that he kissed were his first, they will be his for ever. I have never forgotten; and now I am thirty years old, and my parents, as you know, are dead, and I live alone, and am looked upon as a marvel of eccentricity, and have my school of apostles and fool them to the top of their bent. Sometimes life seems a horrible travesty of all that is dignified and pure, and sometimes a jest that one laughs at and forgets. But no one knows me as I really am, save you, Lauraine. To most people I suppose I hardly seem a woman. But my true self and my lost love live a life apart, a life of dreams, sad but yet beautiful. A life that feeds itself on memories, memories that are recalled by the colours of every changing sky, the scents of leaf and flower that touch one like a sound of music. Ah! those nights, those mornings, those scenes that are the same, yet _not_ the same, how they make one's whole soul sick with longing, and mad with regret!" "And you have borne all this so long?" says Lauraine, wonderingly. "Yes," she answers; "it seems long, does it not? And I have not pined away much. I don't look like a love-lorn maiden, do I? I have not gone into a decline, or fallen away to a shadow, or grown grey with sorrow, or done anything I ought to have done according to romancers. I suppose no one I know ever suspects that I have had a love-story, much less that I cherish its memory." "Your nature must be a very constant one," says Lauraine. "You make me ashamed of myself. No wonder Keith reproaches me with unfaithfulness." "I think fidelity is an established instinct," says Lady Etwynde. "It is very much an accident of our own natures. To me, it seems an utter impossibility to even think of caring for another man. Cyril Carlisle was my first lover; I gave him all that was in me to give. It was all my life to me. I suppose--to him--it was but another experience." "Yours is a grand nature," says Lauraine, looking wonderingly at the calm, noble face. "You shame me for myself. If I had but kept true a little space----"