always.  And those dreamy, magic days that had followed, the more delightful, the more unreal because she had deliberately drugged her conscience.  Then that night at White Horse!  He had told her bitterly, broken-heartedly, that he could never forget.  Perhaps even yet—­With an effort Hilda Courteau roused herself.  Never forget?  Why, he had forgotten the very next day, as was quite natural.  No, she was a foolish sentimentalist, and he—­well, he was just one whom fate had cast for a lover’s role, one destined to excite affection in women, good and bad.  Some day he would find his mate and—­Hilda believed she loved him well enough to rejoice in his happiness when it came.  There spoke the maternal instinct which Phillips had the knack of rousing; for want of something better, she determined she would cherish that.

Meanwhile Laure sat in her corner, her head bowed, her very soul in revolt.  She was tasting failure, disappointment, balked desire, and it was like gall in her mouth.  She could have cried out aloud in her rage.  She hated these other women whom she blamed for her undoing; she hated Cavendish, Pierce Phillips, herself.

“It serves me right,” she told herself, furiously.  “I deserve the pink ticket for making a fool of myself.  Yes, a fool!  What has Pierce ever done for me?  Nothing.  And I—?” Before her mind’s eye came a vision of the opportunities she had let slip, the chances she had ignored.  She knew full well that she could have had the pick of many men—­the new-made millionaires of Dawson—­but instead she had chosen him.  And why?  Merely because he had a way, a smile, a warm and pleasing personality—­some magnetic appeal too intangible to identify.  It was like her to make the wrong choice—­ she always did.  She had come North with but one desire, one determination—­namely, to make money, to reap to the full her share of this free harvest.  She had given up the life she liked, the people she knew, the comforts she craved, for that and for nothing else, and what a mess she had made of the venture!  Other girls not half so smart, not half so pretty as she, had feathered their nests right here before her eyes, while she was wasting her time.  They had kept their heads, and they would go out in the spring, first class, with good clothes and a bank-roll in the purser’s safe.  Some of them were married and respectable.  “Never again!” she whispered to herself.  “The next one will pay.”  Chagrin at the treatment she had suffered filled her with a poisonous hatred of all mankind, and soundlessly she cursed Phillips as the cause of her present plight.

Such thoughts as these ran tumbling through the girl’s mind; her rage and her resentment were real enough; nevertheless, through this overtone there ran another note; a small voice was speaking in the midst of all her tumult—­a small voice which she refused to listen to.  “What I ever saw in him I don’t know,” she sneered, goading herself to further bitterness and stiffening her courage.