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."

"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly, without regret. It
was a truth which she felt only intuitively at the time, for her reason
as yet had hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly evident to
the subtler perceptions of her feeling. She would never write again--her
art had been only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination and
she had lost value as a creative energy while she had gained in
experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the tro