Mr. Raleigh was standing with one hand on the back of his chair, when Mrs. Laudersdale entered.  The cheek had resumed its usual pallor, and she was in her customary colors of black and gold.  She carried a curiously cut crystal glass, which she placed on the sideboard, and then moved toward her chair.  Her eye rested casually for a moment on Mr. Raleigh, as she crossed the threshold, and then returned with a species of calm curiosity.

“Mrs. Laudersdale has forgotten me?” he asked, with a bow.  His voice, not susceptible of change in its tone of Southern sweetness, identified him.

“Not at all,” she replied, moving toward him, and offering him her hand quietly.  “I am happy at meeting Mr. Raleigh again.”  And she took her seat.

There was something in her grasp that relieved him.  It was neither studiedly cold, nor absurdly brief, nor traitorously tremulous.  It was simply and forgetfully indifferent.  Mr. Raleigh surveyed her with interest during the light table-talk.  He had been possessed with a restless wish to see her once more, to ascertain if she had yet any fraction of her old power over him; he had all the more determinedly banished himself from the city,—­to find her in the country.  Now he sought for some trace of what had formerly aroused his heart.  He rose from table convinced that the woman whom he once loved with the whole fervor of youth and strength and buoyant life was no more, that she did not exist, and that Mr. Raleigh might experience a new passion, but his old one was as dead as the ashes that cover the Five Cities of the Plain.  He wondered how it might be with her.  For a moment he cursed his inconstancy; then he feared lest she were of larger heart and firmer resolve than he,—­lest her love had been less light than his; he could scarcely feel himself secure of freedom,—­he must watch.  And then stole in a deeper sense of loneliness than exile and foreign tongues had taught him,—­the knowledge of being single and solitary in the world, not only for life, but for eternity.

The evening was passed in the recitation of affairs by himself and his cousins alone together, and until a week completed its tale of dawns and sunsets there was the same diurnal recurrence of question and answer.  One day, as the afternoon was paling, Rite came.

Mr. Raleigh had fallen asleep on the vine-hidden seat outside the bay-window, and was awakened, certainly not by Mrs. Laudersdale’s velvets trailing over the drawing-room carpet.  She was just entering, slow-paced, though in haste.  She held out both of her beautiful arms.  A little form of airy lightness, a very snow-wreath, blew into them.

“O ma maman!  Est ce que c’est toi,” it cried. “O comme tu es douce!  Si belle, si molle, si chere!” And the fair head was lying beneath the dark one, the face hidden in the bent and stately neck.

Mr. Raleigh left his seat, unseen, and betook himself to another abode.  As he passed the drawing-room door, on his return, he saw the mother lying on a lounge, with the slight form nestled beside her, playing with it as some tame leopardess might play with her silky whelp.  It was almost the only portion of the maternal nature developed within her.