“Then it will last—­it must.”

“Last!” An expression of irritation showed in his eyes, and he shrugged his shoulders with an impatient movement.  “Of course it won’t last—­nothing does.  If you want the eternal you must seek it in eternity.”

“So in the end it will be like—­all the others?”

Because the question annoyed him he responded to it with a frankness that was almost brutal.  “Everything is like everything else,” he returned, “there’s nothing new, least of all in the emotions.”

For a minute she looked at him in silence while the steady green flame appeared to him to grow brighter in her eyes.  Was it contempt or curiosity that he saw in her face?

“Poor Laura!” she said at last very softly.  “Poor happy Laura!”

At her words his dissenting laugh broke out, but he showed by his animated glance a moment later that it was of herself rather than of Laura that he was thinking.

“Is it such a terrible fate, after all, to become my wife?” he enquired.

His look challenged hers, and lifting her insolent bright eyes, she returned steadily the smiling gaze he bent upon her.

“Oh, dear me, yes,” she answered merrily, “it is almost if not quite as bad as being Perry’s.”  The carriage had stopped at the door of his club, and his mind was already at work over the approaching interview.

“Well, you escaped the lesser for the greater ill,” he responded pleasantly, as he gave her hand a careless parting pressure.

PART III

DISENCHANTMENT

CHAPTER I

A DISCONSOLATE LOVER AND A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

With that strange hunger of youth for the agony of experience, Trent allowed the news of Laura’s engagement to plunge him into an imaginary despondency which was quite as vivid as any reality of suffering.  For a week he persistently refused his meals, and he was even seized with a kind of moral indignation when his perfectly healthy appetite asserted itself at irregular hours.  To eat with a broken heart appeared to him an act of positive brutality; and yet he was aware that, in spite of the sting of his wounded pride, the tragic ending of his first romance produced not the slightest effect upon his physical enjoyment.  It was an instance where a purely ideal sentiment struggled against a perfectly normal constitution.

“You could never have cared for me, of course I always knew that,” he remarked one day to Laura, “but I can’t help wishing that you hadn’t fallen in love with anybody else.”

From the bright remoteness of her happiness she smiled down upon him.  “But doesn’t such a wish as that strike you as rather selfish?”

“I don’t care—­I want you back again just as you used to be—­and now,” he added bitterly, “you’ve even given up your writing.”