a meeting about
those everlasting mines--Perry's in it, too, and it's really helped his
mind to get the better of his lungs at last."

"But I thought Arnold was coming this afternoon," returned Laura, a
little hurt.

With a laughing glance at Mrs. Payne, who sat counting silk stockings by
the window, Gerty buried her face in her muff while she shook with
unaffected merriment.

"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 imagina