Mrs. Wentworth burst into laughter, but it was not very merry.

“My dear Alice, you must have been romantic.  How old were you, did you say?”

“It was three years before I was married,” said Mrs. Lancaster, firmly.

Her friend gazed at her with a puzzled expression on her face.

“Oh!  Now, my dear Alice, don’t let’s have any more of this sentimentalizing.  I never indulge in it; it always gives me a headache.  One might think you were a school-girl.”

At the word a wood in all the bravery of Spring sprang into Alice’s mind.  A young girl was seated on the mossy ground, and outstretched at her feet was a young man, fresh-faced and clear-eyed, quoting a poem of youth and of love.

“Heaven knows I wish I were,” said Mrs. Lancaster, soberly.  “I might then be something different from what I am!”

“Oh, nonsense!  You do nothing of the kind.  Here are you, a rich woman, young, handsome, with a great establishment; perfectly free, with no one to interfere with you in any way.  Now, I—­”

“That’s just it,” broke in Mrs. Lancaster, bitterly.  “Free!  Free from what my heart aches for.  Free to dress in sables and diamonds and die of loneliness.”  She had sat up, and her eyes were glowing and her color flashing in her cheeks in her energy.

Mrs. Wentworth looked at her with a curious expression in her eyes.

“I want what you have, Louise Caldwell.  In that big house with only ourselves and servants—­sometimes I could wish I were dead.  I envy every woman I see on the street with her children.  Yes, I am free—­too free!  I married for respect, and I have it.  But—­I want devotion, sympathy.  You have it.  You have a husband who adores you, and children to fill your heart, cherish it.”  The light in her eyes was almost fierce as she leaned forward, her hands clasped so tightly that the knuckles showed white, and a strange look passed for a moment over Mrs. Wentworth’s face.

“You are enough to give one the blue-devils!” she exclaimed, with impatience.  “Let’s have a liqueur.”  She touched a bell, but Mrs. Lancaster rose.

“No; I will go.”

“Oh, yes; just a glass.”  A servant appeared like an automaton at the door.

“What will you have, Alice?” But Mrs. Lancaster was obdurate.  She declined the invitation, and declared that she must go, as she was going to the opera; and the next moment the two ladies were taking leave of each other with gracious words and the formal manner that obtains in fashionable society, quite as if they had known each other just fifteen minutes.

Mrs. Lancaster drove home, leaning very far back in her brougham.

Mrs. Wentworth, too, appeared rather fatigued after her guest departed, and sat for fifteen minutes with the social column of a newspaper lying in her lap unscanned.

“I thought she and Ferdy liked each other,” she said to herself; “but he must have told the truth.  They cannot have cared for each other.  I think she must have been in love with that man.”