She sits quite silent, her hands busy with some crewel-work that she is doing. Mrs. Bradshaw B. Woollffe is paying her a morning visit. Lady Jean has fled at the first approach of the enemy, and so Lauraine has to entertain her alone. Mrs. Woollffe talks on, on; but her listener hears nothing of what she says. Her thoughts are only with the man whose life she has wrecked. Her storm-shattered heart aches and throbs with memories freshly brought to life. She has done what was right; she has severed her life from his, but if it makes him evil, desperate, hopeless; if it sends him to profligate men and bad women, if his bright young manhood is laid waste and desolate, was it, could it be right, after all? Her influence, her presence, had always been a restraint upon him, and she had denied him both--cast him out to the fire of temptations, the recklessness of despair. It was a horrible thought; no one knows how horrible save a woman whose soul is pure, whose heart is passionate, who sees the life she loves and fain would bless, pass out and away from her keeping, and knows that it is beyond her power to recall or claim its fidelity; who sees it lose itself in evil, and seek forgetfulness in wild and feverish excitements, and knows that a word, one little word might have held it back and kept it safe and unharmed. "I must not think of it, I _must_ not," she says to herself in scorn; and she looks up from the tangled crewels and tries to interest herself in Mrs. Bradshaw Woollffe's gossip, and promises to drive with her in the Lichtenthal Allée, forgetful of Lady Jean's disgust. "Well, I'll go," says her loquacious friend at last. "Guess I've got heaps of shopping to do this morning, and Nan will be that cross for keeping her waiting! Good-bye, my dear; good-bye. Hope I haven't tired you. Four o'clock then." The door closes; Lauraine is alone. She sinks wearily back in her chair. The silks and canvas fall unheeded to the floor. She is afraid of this new pain that has come to her--this jealous hatred and horror of the woman who is holding Keith in her evil bondage. Her strength seems all fled. The long, empty, colourless days that stretch before her, that have to be lived through, look doubly dreary in this hour. "I thought the worst bitterness of my cup had passed my lips," she moans. "I had not thought of this." Her husband had asked her carelessly about Keith, and she had spoken of that brief meeting in the Tyrolean valley. Sir Francis had not heard of his being at Baden at all. A sort of dread comes over her as she thinks of the chance of other meetings, of the added pain that each fresh account of his actions may bring her. He had, indeed, known how to make her suffer, and the suffering could have no anodyne now.