“Oh, you can’t imagine how all this comes in for entertaining,” replied Gerty, shaking out her skirt as she rose from her knees.

Laura’s eyes were on Kemper’s face, and she saw that it wore a look of annoyance beneath the conventional smile with which he responded to Gerty’s words.  Something had evidently happened to displease him, and she waited a little anxiously half hoping for, half dreading her friend’s departure.

“I trust you’ll go through the ceremony more gracefully than Perry did,” Gerty was saying with a teasing merriment, while she broke a white rosebud from the vase of flowers and fastened it in his coat.  “I declare he quite spoiled the whole effect, he looked so frightened.  I never realised how little sense of humour Perry has until I saw him at the altar.”

“Well, it isn’t exactly a joke, you know,” retorted Kemper.

For the first time, as Laura watched him, she remembered that he had been through it all before without her; and the thought entered her heart like a dagger, that even now there was another woman alive somewhere in the world who had been his wife—­who had been almost as much loved, almost as close to him as she herself was to-day.  The thought sickened her, and she felt again her blind terror of a step so irrevocable.

Gerty had gone at last; and Kemper, after walking twice up and down the room, stopped to examine a silver coffee service with an attention which was so evidently assumed that Laura was convinced he might as well have fixed his gaze upon the fireplace.  His thoughts were busily occupied in quite an opposite direction from his eyes, for turning presently, he laid down the sugar bowl he had picked up, and went rapidly to the mantel piece, where he took down a photograph of Roger Adams.

“You don’t see much of Adams now?” he remarked enquiringly.

“Not much,” she went over to the mantel and glanced carelessly at the picture in his hand.  “I never shall again.”

“How’s that? and why?”

“Oh, I don’t know—­one never sees much of one’s friends after marriage, somehow.  To supply the world to me,” she added gayly, “is a part of the responsibility of your position.”

Though his gaze was fixed intently upon her face, she saw clearly that he had hardly taken in her words, for while she spoke his hands wandered to the inside pocket of his coat, as if he wished to make sure of a letter he had placed there.

“By the way, Laura, a queer thing happened to-day,” he said, frowning.

She looked up a little startled.

“A queer thing?”

“I had a letter from Madame Alta asking why I hadn’t sold some stock I’d been holding for her?  She lost a good deal by my not selling and she was in a devilish temper about it.”

Laura had not lowered her eyes, and as he finished she smiled into his face.

“And you did not sell?” she asked.

“I never got the letter—­but the odd part is she says she came to see me about it the day you were there with Gerty—­that she saw you and that she left the letter with you to deliver—­”