“Oh, my dear, what a wife you’ll make if you haven’t learned to mask your feelings!” she exclaimed, “but as for Arnold, he wants me to bring you to his rooms for tea.  The Symonds portrait has come and he’d like us to see it before it’s hung.  He’ll hurry back, he says, the minute that abominable meeting is over-though between you and me he is almost as much interested in those mines as he is in his marriage.”

The disappointment in Laura’s face was succeeded by an expression of impatient eagerness, and a little later as she drove with Gerty through the streets she was able to convince herself that the uncertainty of the last fortnight had yielded finally to the perfect security for which she longed Sitting there in Gerty’s carriage, she felt with a compassionate heart-throb, that out of her own fulness she could look down and pity the emptiness of her friend’s life; and this thought filled her bosom with a sympathy which overflowed in the smile she turned upon the brilliant woman at her side.

“I find myself continually rejoicing because you are to take a house up town,” remarked Gerty, as she pressed Laura’s hand under the fur robe.  “When you come back we’ll see each other every day, and when you land, I’ll be there to welcome you with the house full of flowers and the dinner ordered.”

“There’s no use trying to realise it all, I can’t,” responded Laura; and the interest with which she entered immediately into a discussion of furnishing and housekeeping banished from her mind all recollection of the despondency, the tormenting doubts, of the last few weeks.  Yes, all would go well—­all must go well in spite of everything she had imagined.  Once married she would see this foolish foreboding dissolve in air, and with the wedding ceremony she would enter into that cloudless happiness which she had expected so confidently to find in the Adirondacks.  This new hope possessed her instantly to the exclusion of all other ideas, and she clung to it as passionately as she had clung to every illusion of the kind which had presented itself to her imagination.

When they reached his rooms, Kemper had not returned, and while Gerty amused herself by examining every photograph upon his desk and mantel, Laura drew a chair before the portrait, which was a bold, half-length study painted with a daring breadth of handling.  The artist was a new French painter, who had leaped into prominence because of a certain extravagance of style which he affected; and his work had taken Kemper’s fancy as everything took it either in art or in life which deviated in any marked eccentricity from the ordinary level of culture or of experience.

“There’s something queer about it—­I don’t like it,” said Laura, with her first glance.  “Why, it makes him look almost brutal—­there’s a quality in it I’ll never grow accustomed to.”