CHAPTER V

In the dressing-room of her Park Lane mansion a woman stands dressed for the evening.

Her face is lovely, her toilet exquisite, a rain of diamonds seems to glitter about her; but there is no gladness in the eyes that gaze at their own reflection, and an unnatural gravity and sadness seem to sit on the white brow and round the soft young lips.

It is the face of Lauraine--Lady Vavasour.

A maid enters with a bouquet and a note, and gives them to her. "Sir Francis desired me to say he was waiting, my lady," she says respectfully.

"I will be down immediately. You can take my cloak," answers her mistress.

The maid leaves the room, and Laura opens the note and reads the few lines it contains. Her face does not change except to grow even sadder for a moment. Then she tears up the letter, and taking the flowers in her hand, sweeps slowly away. She moves across the richly carpeted corridor, and enters another room facing her own. It is dimly lighted, and all its draperies are pure white, and the furniture of satinwood. In one corner stands a little cot, the lace curtains looped back with pale azure ribbons. A woman rises at her entrance, and stands up respectfully. Lauraine passes her, and goes over to the little bed and looks down with eyes full of love unutterable at its inmate.

A child lies there asleep. Soft, dusky rings of hair curl round the broad, white brow--the cheeks are flushed like a rose--the tiny scarlet mouth is half open--the little hands lie outside the snowy coverlet. Lauraine's face grows transfigured as she looks on that baby form; such love--such rapture--such pure, holy, exquisite joy irradiates it! She stoops down and presses her lips to the baby brow--takes one long, idolizing look at the cherubic loveliness that is her dearest earthly treasure, and then whispers some parting injunctions to the nurse and leaves the room.

"How long you have been! What a deuce of a time you women do take to put your gowns on," grumbles her husband, as he meets her at the bottom of the stairs. "The horses have been standing out there in the cold for more than half an hour."

Lauraine makes a sign to her maid to put on her wraps, and then follows her husband out to the carriage. He has not looked at her--he has not noticed one detail of the exquisite toilette--his voice in addressing her is harsh and impatient, and they have been married but two years. Yet the coldness and indifference she now receives is ten thousand times preferable, she thinks, to the frantic passion that he had once bestowed. He had been mad to have her, and he had won her! Now--well, now that infatuation looked as absurd as it had once been imperative. It is a man's nature; it always has been and always will be so.

Lauraine too feels strangely changed. She seems to have grown cold, hard, indifferent to everything. These two years seem like ten. This is her first season in London since she married, and she looks upon it as a duty enforced, and with not one throb of pleasure or anticipation. She is young, rich, and very lovely; but she carries a heavy heart within that beautiful bosom, and knows that the one great error of her life is ever demanding compensation.

Six months ago she and Keith Athelstone met again. He had gone back to New York after her marriage, to settle his affairs, and for eighteen months she had neither seen nor heard anything of him. When they met in Rome she had been startled and afraid of the change wrought in so brief a time. He looked years older. The bright, genial, sunny temper that had given him so great a charm was now sullen, uncertain, and bitter. He was restless, extravagant, and capricious. Much that she had heard of him pained and annoyed her deeply; but she scarcely dared remonstrate for fear of being met with a sneer or a reproach. Her husband took an unaccountable fancy to the young fellow, and had him constantly at their house; but it frightened Lauraine to see the hatred and contempt that at times flashed out in Keith's eyes and voice against the man who called him friend. No word of the past--no allusion to that wedding-morning of hers--ever passed between the young man and herself. She almost hoped he had forgotten his boyish passion--would be content to accept the friendship she had once proffered him, and he had rejected so scornfully.

For herself nothing seemed to signify much now. The whole tenderness of her nature spent itself on her child.

If she could have had her way, she would have liked to live in the quiet old Northumbrian house which was her husband's, and there given herself exclusively up to the care and teaching of her boy. But such a wild idea, was of course, scouted and ridiculed.

Her husband was proud of her in a way--proud of the sparkling beauty, the dainty grace, the mind and manners of the woman he had made his wife. She would never be fast or vulgar, or think only of conquests and admiration, and drag his name through the mire of scandal. No; she would always be _safe_--that he felt, and if he had grown tired of her he was determined that the world should see and admire her, and applaud his choice. It would gratify his vanity, just as it had done in Rome, where she had been courted and worshipped and eulogized everywhere as "Lady Lauraine."

The carriage rolls smoothly and swiftly on. Lauraine leans back, with her eyes gazing dreamily out at the lighted streets. Her husband breaks the silence at last.

"I want you to be specially civil to Lady Jean," he says abruptly. "You were very stand-offish when she called on you the other day. She's the most popular woman in London, and the prettiest. You two ought to be friends."

"I don't like her," answers Lauraine coldly.

"Don't like her!" he sneers. "No, of course not. That's just like a woman. The moment a man praises one of your own sex to you, it's quite sufficient reason for you to dislike her. Pray, what's your objection?"

Lauraine colours faintly.

"She is loud and fast. She ridicules every good and honest feeling, and I think she is very malicious."

"The secret of her success perhaps," laughs her husband. "People are afraid of her sharp tongue. _Tant mieux_. But she is at all events a woman one would not get tired of. Few know how to make themselves more agreeable."

"To men, perhaps."

"Well, that's paying us a great compliment. A woman making herself agreeable to women is taking a great deal of trouble for no purpose unless, of course, they have the _entrée_ where she has not. But Lady Jean goes everywhere."

"And Lady Jean's husband?" asks Lauraine.

Sir Francis laughs. "Well, one doesn't see much of him certainly. But he's worth nearly a million, for all that. The earl wouldn't have let his daughter marry him if he hadn't been."

"Was Lady Jean poor?"

"Very poor. The Earl of Killery had six daughters. She was the youngest, and the only one who has married. She's been married six years now."

"You knew her before--before----" hesitates Lauraine.

"Before I married you? Oh, yes. We were very good friends always. That's why I hope you and she will hit it off. She'll be of great use to you."

Lauraine is silent. In her own mind she thinks she shall never be able to "hit it off," as Sir Francis expresses it. She and Lady Jean are totally opposite in many respects, and she has that instinctive antipathy to her which a pure and high-principled woman often conceives for one whose morals are lax, whose nature is coarse, whose views, tastes and opinions are utterly antagonistic to her own.

The carriage stops at last. They get out and are marshalled up a crowded staircase and into yet more crowded rooms. Lady Jean Saloman receives them cordially. She looks radiant. If not a positively beautiful woman she at least is a woman who always contrives to make herself immediately noticed even amidst beauty. She is very tall; dresses superbly: wears jewels fit for an empress, and is too much a woman of the world not to know the worth of popularity.

Her own birth and breeding were irreproachable, and she could be _grande dame_ to the tips of her toes when she pleased. But when the