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+Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7, by Winston Churchill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7
+
+Author: Winston Churchill
+
+Release Date: October 19, 2004 [EBook #5380]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MODERN CHRONICLE, VOLUME 7 ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN CHRONICLE
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+Volume 7.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN
+
+All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their
+colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea. A gold-bound volume of
+Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap. And two lines she
+repeated softly to herself--two lines that held a vision:
+
+       "He was as the sun in his fierce youth,
+        As terrible and lovely as a tempest;"
+
+She summoned him out of the chaos of the past, and the past became the
+present, and he stood before her as though in the flesh. Nay, she heard
+his voice, his laugh, she even recognized again the smouldering flames in
+his eyes as he glanced into hers, and his characteristic manners and
+gestures. Honora wondered. In vain, during those long months of exile had
+she tried to reconstruct him thus the vision in its entirety would not
+come: rare, fleeting, partial, and tantalizing glimpses she had been
+vouchsafed, it is true. The whole of him had been withheld until this
+breathless hour before the dawn of her happiness.
+
+Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with
+this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear
+within her. Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been,
+insistent questions dinned in her ears: was she entitled to the joys to
+come? What had she done to earn them? Had hers not been an attempt, on a
+gigantic scale, to cheat the fates? Nor could she say whether this
+feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or the
+old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so
+persistently.
+
+The Hudson disappeared. Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts,
+ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and
+there. The train was running on a causeway between miles of tenements
+where women and children, overtaken by lassitude, hung out of the
+windows: then the blackness of the tunnel, and Honora closed her eyes.
+Four minutes, three minutes, two minutes . . . . The motion ceased. At
+the steps of the car a uniformed station porter seized her bag; and she
+started to walk down the long, narrow platform. Suddenly she halted.
+
+"Drop anything, Miss?" inquired the porter.
+
+"No," answered Honora, faintly. He looked at her in concern, and she
+began to walk on again, more slowly.
+
+It had suddenly come over her that the man she was going to meet she
+scarcely knew! Shyness seized her, a shyness that bordered on panic. And
+what was he really like, that she should put her whole trust in him? She
+glanced behind her: that way was closed: she had a mad desire to get
+away, to hide, to think. It must have been an obsession that had
+possessed her all these months. The porter was looking again, and he
+voiced her predicament.
+
+"There's only one way out, Miss."
+
+And then, amongst the figures massed behind the exit in the grill, she
+saw him, his face red-bronze with the sea tan, his crisp, curly head
+bared, his eyes alight with a terrifying welcome; and a tremor of a fear
+akin to ecstasy ran through her: the fear of the women of days gone by
+whose courage carried them to the postern or the strand, and fainted
+there. She could have taken no step farther--and there was no need. New
+strength flowed from the hand she held that was to carry her on and on.
+
+He spoke her name. He led her passive, obedient, through the press to the
+side street, and then he paused and looked into her burning face.
+
+"I have you at last," he said. "Are you happy?"
+
+"I don't know," she faltered. "Oh, Hugh, it all seems so strange! I don't
+know what I have done."
+
+"I know," he said exultantly; "but to save my soul I can't believe it."
+
+She watched him, bewildered, while he put her maid into a cab, and by an
+effort roused herself.
+
+"Where are you going, Hugh?"
+
+"To get married," he replied promptly.
+
+She pulled down her veil.
+
+"Please be sensible," she implored. "I've arranged to go to a hotel."
+
+"What hotel?"
+
+"The--the Barnstable," she said. The place had come to her memory on the
+train. "It's very nice and--and quiet--so I've been told. And I've
+telegraphed for my rooms."
+
+"I'll humour you this once," he answered, and gave the order.
+
+She got into the carriage. It had blue cushions with the familiar smell
+of carriage upholstery, and the people in the street still hurried about
+their business as though nothing in particular were happening. The horses
+started, and some forgotten key in her brain was touched as Chiltern
+raised her veil again.
+
+"You'll tear it, Hugh," she said, and perforce lifted it herself. Her
+eyes met his--and she awoke. Not to memories or regrets, but to the
+future, for the recording angel had mercifully destroyed his book.
+
+"Did you miss me?" she said.
+
+"Miss you! My God, Honora, how can you ask? When I look back upon these
+last months, I don't see how I ever passed through them. And you are
+changed," he said. "I could not have believed it possible, but you are.
+You are--you are finer."
+
+He had chosen his word exquisitely. And then, as they trotted sedately
+through Madison Avenue, he strained her in his arms and kissed her.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, scarlet, as she disengaged, herself, "you mustn't
+--here!"
+
+"You're free!" he exclaimed. "You're mine at last! I can't believe it!
+Look at me, and tell me so."
+
+She tried.
+
+"Yes," she faltered.
+
+"Yes--what?"
+
+"Yes. I--I am yours."
+
+She looked out of the window to avoid those eyes. Was this New York, or
+Jerusalem? Were these the streets through which she had driven and trod
+in her former life? Her whole soul cried out denial. No episode, no
+accusing reminiscences stood out--not one: the very corners were changed.
+Would it all change back again if he were to lessen the insistent
+pressure on the hand in her lap.
+
+"Honora?"
+
+"Yes?" she answered, with a start.
+
+"You missed me? Look at me and tell me the truth."
+
+"The truth!" she faltered, and shuddered. The contrast was too great
+--the horror of it too great for her to speak of. The pen of Dante had
+not been adequate. "Don't ask me, Hugh," she begged, "I can't talk about
+it--I never shall be able to talk about it. If I had not loved you, I
+should have died."
+
+How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the
+quivering pressure on her hand. Ah, if he had not! If he had failed to
+grasp the meaning of her purgatory.
+
+"You are wonderful, Honora," was what he said in a voice broken by
+emotion.
+
+She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant of
+all her priceless possessions. The carriage stopped, but it was some
+moments before they realized it.
+
+"You may come up in a little while," she whispered, "and lunch with me
+--if you like."
+
+"If I like!" he repeated.
+
+But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
+marble-lined area of the hotel. A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and set
+the new universe to rocking.
+
+"Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume? We have your telegram."
+
+Mrs. Leffingwell! Who was that person? For an instant she stood blankly
+holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
+"Mrs. Leffingwell and maid." A pause. Where was her home? Then she added
+the words, "St. Louis."
+
+Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
+the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite. While Mathilde,
+in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
+the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts. Her spirits had
+unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her all
+these months overtaken her once more. Never, never, she told herself,
+would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came she clung
+to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he could not
+understand it.
+
+"Hugh--you will care for me?" she cried.
+
+He kissed away her tears. He could not follow her; he only knew that what
+he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before. Tender, and
+again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such miraculous
+delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an harmonious
+and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow,--of all
+the warring elements in the world. What he felt was the supreme masculine
+joy of possession.
+
+At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had
+laid, for even the gods must eat. Not that our deified mortals ate much
+on this occasion. Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over
+gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to
+take shape in the mind of the man. Presently he looked at his watch, and
+then at the woman, and made a suggestion.
+
+"Marry you now--this of afternoon!" she cried, aghast. "Hugh, are you in
+your right senses?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "I'm reasonable for the first time in my life."
+
+She laughed, and immediately became serious. But when she sought to
+marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.
+
+"Oh, but I couldn't," she answered. "And besides, there are so many
+things I ought to do. I--I haven't any clothes."
+
+But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize. He saw no
+reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.
+
+"Is that all?" he demanded.
+
+"No--that isn't all. Can't you see that--that we ought to wait, Hugh?"
+
+"No," he exclaimed, "No I can't see it. I can only see that every moment
+of waiting would be a misery for us both. I can only see that the
+situation, as it is to-day, is an intolerable one for you."
+
+She had not expected him to see this.
+
+"There are others to be thought of," she said, after a moment's
+hesitation.
+
+"What others?"
+
+The answer she should have made died on her lips.
+
+"It seems so-indecorous, Hugh."
+
+"Indecorous!" he cried, and pushed back his chair and rose. "What's
+indecorous about it? To leave you here alone in a hotel in New York would
+not only be indecorous, but senseless. How long would you put it off? a
+week--a month--a year? Where would you go in the meantime, and what would
+you do?"
+
+"But your friends, Hugh--and mine?"
+
+"Friends! What have they got to do with it?"
+
+It was the woman, now, who for a moment turned practical--and for the
+man's sake. She loved, and the fair fabric of the future which they were
+to weave together, and the plans with which his letters had been filled
+and of which she had dreamed in exile, had become to-day as the stuff of
+which moonbeams are made. As she looked up at him, eternity itself did
+not seem long enough for the fulfilment of that love. But he? Would the
+time not come when he would demand something more? and suppose that
+something were denied? She tried to rouse herself, to think, to consider
+a situation in which her instinct had whispered just once--there must be
+some hidden danger: but the electric touch of his hand destroyed the
+process, and made her incapable of reason.
+
+"What should we gain by a week's or a fortnight's delay," he was saying,
+"except so much misery?"
+
+She looked around the hotel sitting-room, and tried to imagine the
+desolation of it, stripped of his presence. Why not? There was reason in
+what he said. And yet, if she had known it, it was not to reason she
+yielded, but to the touch of his hand.
+
+"We will be married to-day," he decreed. "I have planned it all. I have
+bought the 'Adhemar', the yacht which I chartered last winter. She is
+here. We'll go off on her together, away from the world, for as long as
+you like. And then," he ended triumphantly, "then we'll go back to
+Grenoble and begin our life."
+
+"And begin our life!" she repeated. But it was not to him that she spoke.
+"Hugh, I positively have to have some clothes."
+
+"Clothes!" His voice expressed his contempt for the mundane thought.
+
+"Yes, clothes," she repeated resolutely.
+
+He looked at his watch once more.
+
+"Very well," he said, "we'll get 'em on the way."
+
+"On the way?" she asked.
+
+"We'll have to have a marriage license, I'm afraid," he explained
+apologetically.
+
+Honora grew crimson. A marriage license!
+
+She yielded, of course. Who could resist him? Nor need the details of
+that interminable journey down the crowded artery of Broadway to the
+Centre of Things be entered into. An ignoble errand, Honora thought; and
+she sat very still, with flushed cheeks, in the corner of the carriage.
+Chiltern's finer feelings came to her rescue. He, too, resented this
+senseless demand of civilization as an indignity to their Olympian loves.
+And he was a man to chafe at all restraints. But at last the odious thing
+was over, grim and implacable Law satisfied after he had compelled them
+to stand in line for an interminable period before his grill, and mingle
+with those whom he chose, in his ignorance, to call their peers. Honora
+felt degraded as they emerged with the hateful paper, bought at such a
+price. The City Hall Park, with its moving streams of people, etched
+itself in her memory.
+
+"Leave me, Hugh," she said; "I will take this carriage--you must get
+another one."
+
+For once, he accepted his dismissal with comparative meekness.
+
+"When shall I come?" he asked.
+
+"She smiled a little, in spite of herself.
+
+"You may come for me at six o'clock," she replied.
+
+"Six o'clock!" he exclaimed; but accepted with resignation and closed the
+carriage door. Enigmatical sex!
+
+Enigmatical sex indeed! Honora spent a feverish afternoon, rest and
+reflection being things she feared. An afternoon in familiar places; and
+(strangest of all facts to be recorded!) memories and regrets troubled
+her not at all. Her old dressmakers, her old milliners, welcomed her as
+one risen, radiant, from the grave; risen, in their estimation, to a
+higher life. Honora knew this, and was indifferent to the wealth of
+meaning that lay behind their discretion. Milliners and dressmakers read
+the newspapers and periodicals--certain periodicals. Well they knew that
+the lady they flattered was the future Mrs. Hugh Chiltern.
+
+Nothing whatever of an indelicate nature happened. There was no mention
+of where to send the bill, or of whom to send it to. Such things as she
+bought on the spot were placed in her carriage. And happiest of all
+omissions, she met no one she knew. The praise that Madame Barriere
+lavished on Honora's figure was not flattery, because the Paris models
+fitted her to perfection. A little after five she returned to her hotel,
+to a Mathilde in a high state of suppressed excitement. And at six, the
+appointed fateful hour, arrayed in a new street gown of dark green cloth,
+she stood awaiting him.
+
+He was no laggard. The bell on the church near by was still singing from
+the last stroke when he knocked, flung open the door, and stood for a
+moment staring at her. Not that she had been shabby when he had wished to
+marry her at noon: no self-respecting woman is ever shabby; not that her
+present costume had any of the elements of overdress; far from it. Being
+a woman, she had her thrill of triumph at his exclamation. Diana had no
+need, perhaps, of a French dressmaker, but it is an open question whether
+she would have scorned them. Honora stood motionless, but her smile for
+him was like the first quivering shaft of day. He opened a box, and with
+a strange mixture of impetuosity and reverence came forward. And she saw
+that he held in his hand a string of great, glistening pearls.
+
+"They were my mother's," he said. "I have had them restrung--for you."
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried. She could find no words to express the tremor
+within. And she stood passively, her eyes half closed, while he clasped
+the string around the lace collar that pressed the slender column of her
+neck and kissed her.
+
+Even the humble beings who work in hotels are responsive to unusual
+disturbances in the ether. At the Barnstable, a gala note prevailed: bell
+boys, porters, clerk, and cashier, proud of their sudden wisdom, were
+wreathed in smiles. A new automobile, in Chiltern's colours, with his
+crest on the panel, was panting beside the curb.
+
+"I meant to have had it this morning," he apologized as he handed her in,
+"but it wasn't ready in time."
+
+Honora heard him, and said something in reply. She tried in vain to rouse
+herself from the lethargy into which she had fallen, to cast off the
+spell. Up Fifth Avenue they sped, past meaningless houses, to the Park.
+The crystal air of evening was suffused with the level evening light; and
+as they wound in and out under the spreading trees she caught glimpses
+across the shrubbery of the deepening blue of waters. Pools of mystery
+were her eyes.
+
+The upper West Side is a definite place on the map, and full,
+undoubtedly, of palpitating human joys and sorrows. So far as Honora was
+concerned, it might have been Bagdad. The automobile had stopped before a
+residence, and she found herself mounting the steps at Chiltern's side. A
+Swedish maid opened the door.
+
+"Is Mr. White at home?" Chiltern asked.
+
+It seemed that "the Reverend Mr. White" was. He appeared, a portly
+gentleman with frock coat and lawn tie who resembled the man in the moon.
+His head, like polished ivory, increased the beaming effect of his
+welcome, and the hand that pressed Honora's was large and soft and warm.
+But dreams are queer things, in which no events surprise us.
+
+The reverend gentleman, as he greeted Chiltern, pronounced his name with
+unction. His air of hospitality, of good-fellowship, of taking the world
+as he found it, could not have been improved upon. He made it apparent at
+once that nothing could surprise him. It was the most natural
+circumstance in life that two people should arrive at his house in an
+automobile at half-past six in the evening and wish to get married: if
+they chose this method instead of the one involving awnings and policemen
+and uncomfortably-arrayed relations and friends, it was none of Mr.
+White's affair. He led them into the Gothic sanctum at the rear of the
+house where the famous sermons were written that shook the sounding-board
+of the temple where the gentleman preached,--the sermons that sometimes
+got into the newspapers. Mr. White cleared his throat.
+
+"I am--very familiar with your name, Mr. Chiltern," he said, "and it is a
+pleasure to be able to serve you, and the lady who is so shortly to be
+your wife. Your servant arrived with your note at four o'clock. Ten
+minutes later, and I should have missed him."
+
+And then Honora heard Chiltern saying somewhat coldly:--"In order to
+save time, Mr. White, I wish to tell you that Mrs. Leffingwell has been
+divorced--"
+
+The Reverend Mr. White put up a hand before him, and looked down at the
+carpet, as one who would not dwell upon painful things.
+
+"Unfortunate--ahem--mistakes will occur in life, Mr. Chiltern--in the
+best of lives," he replied. "Say no more about it. I am sure, looking at
+you both--"
+
+"Very well then," said Chiltern brusquely, "I knew you would have to
+know. And here," he added, "is an essential paper."
+
+A few minutes later, in continuation of the same strange dream, Honora
+was standing at Chiltern's side and the Reverend Mr. White was addressing
+them: What he said--apart of it at least--seemed curiously familiar.
+Chiltern put a ring on a finger of her ungloved hand. It was a supreme
+moment in her destiny--this she knew. Between her responses she repeated
+it to herself, but the mighty fact refused to be registered. And then,
+suddenly, rang out the words:
+
+   "Those whom God hath joined together let no man Put asunder."
+
+Those whom God hath joined together! Mr. White was congratulating her.
+Other people were in the room--the minister's son, his wife, his
+brother-in-law. She was in the street again, in the automobile, without
+knowing how she got there, and Chiltern close beside her in the
+limousine.
+
+"My wife!" he whispered.
+
+Was she? Could it be true, be lasting, be binding for ever and ever? Her
+hand pressed his convulsively.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, "care for me--stay by me forever. Will you
+promise?"
+
+"I promise, Honora," he repeated. "Henceforth we are one."
+
+Honora would have prolonged forever that honeymoon on summer seas. In
+those blissful days she was content to sit by the hour watching him as,
+bareheaded in the damp salt breeze, he sailed the great schooner and gave
+sharp orders to the crew. He was a man who would be obeyed, and even his
+flashes of temper pleased her. He was her master, too, and she gloried in
+the fact. By the aid of the precious light within her, she studied him.
+
+He loved her mightily, fiercely, but withal tenderly. With her alone he
+was infinitely tender, and it seemed that something in him cried out for
+battle against the rest of the world. He had his way, in port and out of
+it. He brooked no opposition, and delighted to carry, against his
+captain's advice, more canvas than was wise when it blew heavily. But the
+yacht, like a woman, seemed a creature of his will; to know no fear when
+she felt his guiding hand, even though the green water ran in the
+scuppers.
+
+And every day anew she scanned his face, even as he scanned the face of
+the waters. What was she searching for? To have so much is to become
+miserly, to fear lest a grain of the precious store be lost. On the
+second day they had anchored, for an hour or two, between the sandy
+headlands of a small New England port, and she had stood on the deck
+watching his receding figure under the flag of the gasoline launch as it
+made its way towards the deserted wharves. Beyond the wharves was an
+elm-arched village street, and above the verdure rose the white cupola of
+the house of some prosperous sea-captain of bygone times. Honora had not
+wished to go ashore. First he had begged, and then he had laughed as he
+had leaped into the launch. She lay in a chaise longue, watching it
+swinging idly at the dock.
+
+The night before he had written letters and telegrams. Once he had looked
+up at her as she sat with a book in her hand across the saloon, and
+caught her eyes. She had been pretending not to watch him.
+
+"Wedding announcements," he said.
+
+And she had smiled back at him bravely. Such was the first acknowledgment
+between them that the world existed.
+
+"A little late," he observed, smiling in his turn as he changed his pen,
+"but they'll have to make allowances for the exigencies of the situation.
+And they've been after me to settle down for so many years that they
+ought to be thankful to get them at all. I've told them that after a
+decent period they may come to Grenoble--in the late autumn. We don't
+want anybody before then, do we, Honora?"
+
+"No," she said faintly; and added, "I shall always be satisfied with you
+alone, Hugh."
+
+He laughed happily, and presently she went up on deck and stood with her
+face to the breeze. There were no sounds save the musical beat of the
+water against the strakes, and the low hum of wind on the towering
+vibrant sails. One moulten silver star stood out above all others. To the
+northward, somewhere beyond the spot where sea and sky met in the hidden
+kiss of night, was Newport,--were his relations and her friends. What did
+they think? He, at least, had no anxieties about the world, why should
+she? Their defiance of it had been no greater than that of an hundred
+others on whom it had smiled benignly. But had not the others truckled
+more to its conventions? Little she cared about it, indeed, and if he had
+turned the prow of the 'Adhemar' towards the unpeopled places of the
+earth, her joy would have been untroubled.
+
+One after another the days glided by, while with the sharpened senses of
+a great love she watched for a sign of the thing that slept in him--of
+the thing that had driven him home from his wanderings to re-create his
+life. When it awoke, she would have to share him; now he was hers alone.
+Her feelings towards this thing did not assume the proportions of
+jealousy or fear; they were merely alert, vaguely disquieting. The
+sleeping thing was not a monster. No, but it might grow into one, if its
+appetite were not satisfied, and blame her.
+
+She told herself that, had he lacked ambition, she could not have loved
+him, and did not stop to reflect upon the completeness of her
+satisfaction with the Viking. He seemed, indeed, in these weeks, one whom
+the sea has marked for its own, and her delight in watching him as he
+moved about the boat never palled. His nose reminded her of the prow of a
+ship of war, and his deep-set eyes were continually searching the horizon
+for an enemy. Such were her fancies. In the early morning when he donned
+his sleeveless bathing suit, she could never resist the temptation to
+follow him on deck to see him plunge into the cold ocean: it gave her a
+delightful little shiver--and he was made like one of the gods of
+Valhalla.
+
+She had discovered, too, in these intimate days, that he had the
+Northman's temperament; she both loved and dreaded his moods. And
+sometimes, when the yacht glided over smoother seas, it was his pleasure
+to read to her, even poetry and the great epics. That he should be fond
+of the cruel Scotch ballads she was not surprised; but his familiarity
+with the book of Job, and his love for it, astonished her. It was a
+singular library that he had put on board the 'Adhemar'.
+
+One evening when the sails flapped idly and the blocks rattled, when they
+had been watching in silence the flaming orange of the sunset above the
+amethystine Camden hills, he spoke the words for which she had been
+waiting.
+
+"Honora, what do you say to going back to Grenoble?"
+
+She succeeded in smiling at him.
+
+"Whenever you like, Hugh," she said.
+
+So the bowsprit of the 'Adhemar' was turned homewards; and with every
+league of water they left behind them his excitement and impatience
+seemed to grow.
+
+"I can't wait to show it to you, Honora--to see you in it," he exclaimed.
+"I have so long pictured you there, and our life as it will be."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE ENTRANCE INTO EDEN
+
+They had travelled through the night, and in the early morning left the
+express at a junction. Honora sat in the straight-backed seat of the
+smaller train with parted lips and beating heart, gazing now and again at
+the pearly mists rising from the little river valley they were climbing.
+Chiltern was like a schoolboy.
+
+"We'll soon be there," he cried, but it was nearly nine o'clock when they
+reached the Gothic station that marked the end of the line. It was a
+Chiltern line, he told her, and she was already within the feudal domain.
+Time indeed that she awoke! She reached the platform to confront a group
+of upturned, staring faces, and for the moment her courage failed her.
+Somehow, with Chiltern's help, she made her way to a waiting omnibus
+backed up against the boards. The footman touched his hat, the
+grey-headed coachman saluted, and they got in. As the horses started off
+at a quick trot, Honora saw that the group on the station platform had
+with one consent swung about to stare after them.
+
+They passed through the main street of the town, lined with plate-glass
+windows and lively signs, and already bustling with the business of the
+day, through humbler thoroughfares, and presently rumbled over a bridge
+that spanned a rushing stream confined between the foundation walls of
+mills. Hundreds of yards of mills stretched away on either side; mills
+with windows wide open, and within them Honora heard the clicking and
+roaring of machinery, and saw the men and women at their daily tasks.
+Life was a strange thing that they should be doing this while she should
+be going to live in luxury at a great country place. On one of the walls
+she read the legend Chiltern and Company.
+
+"They still keep our name," said Hugh, "although they are in the trust."
+
+He pointed out to her, with an air of pride, every landmark by the
+roadside. In future they were to have a new meaning--they were to be
+shared with her. And he spoke of the times--as child and youth, home from
+the seashore or college, he had driven over the same road. It wound to
+the left, behind the mills, threaded a village of neat wooden houses
+where the better class of operatives lived, reached the river again, and
+turned at last through a brick gateway, past a lodge in the dense shade
+of sheltering boughs, into a wooded drive that climbed, by gentle
+degrees, a slope. Human care for generations had given to the place a
+tradition. People had lived here and loved those trees--his people. And
+could it be that she was to inherit all this, with him? Was her name
+really Chiltern?
+
+The beating of her heart became a pain when in the distance through the
+spreading branches she caught a glimpse of the long, low outline of the
+house, a vision at once familiar and unreal. How often in the months gone
+by had she called up the memory of the photograph she had once seen, only
+to doubt the more that she should ever behold that house and these trees
+with him by her side! They drew up before the door, and a venerable,
+ruddy-faced butler stood gravely on the steps to welcome them. Hugh
+leaped out. He was still the schoolboy.
+
+"Starling," he said, "this is Mrs. Chiltern."
+
+Honora smiled tremulously.
+
+"How do you do, Starling?" she said.
+
+"Starling's an old friend, Honora. He's been here ever since I can
+remember."
+
+The blue eyes of the old servant were fixed on her with a strange,
+searching expression. Was it compassion she read in them, on this that
+should be the happiest of her days? In that instant, unaccountably, her
+heart went out to the old man; and something of what he had seen, and
+something of what was even now passing within him, came to her
+intuitively. It was as though, unexpectedly, she had found a friend--and
+a friend who had had no previous intentions of friendship.
+
+"I'm sure I wish you happiness, madame,--and Mr. Hugh, he said in a voice
+not altogether firm.
+
+"Happiness!" cried Hugh. "I've never known what it was before now,
+Starling."
+
+The old man's eyes glistened.
+
+"And you've come to stay, sir?"
+
+"All my life, Starling," said Hugh.
+
+They entered the hall. It was wide and cool, white panelled to the
+ceiling, with a dark oak floor. At the back of it was an
+eighteenth-century stairway, with a band of red carpet running up the
+steps, and a wrought-iron guard with a velvet-covered rail. Halfway up,
+the stairway divided at a landing, lighted by great triple windows of
+small panes.
+
+"You may have breakfast in half an hour, Starling," said Chiltern, and
+led Honora up the stairs into the east wing, where he flung open one of
+the high mahogany doors on the south side. "These are your rooms, Honora.
+I have had Keller do them all over for you, and I hope you'll like them.
+If you don't, we'll change them again."
+
+Her answer was an exclamation of delight. There was a bedroom in pink,
+with brocaded satin on the walls, and an oriel window thrust out over the
+garden; a panelled boudoir at the corner of the house, with a marble
+mantel before which one of Marie Antoinette's duchesses had warmed her
+feet; and shelves lined with gold-lettered books. From its windows,
+across the flowering shrubbery and through the trees, she saw the
+gleaming waters of a lake, and the hills beyond. From this view she
+turned, and caught her breath, and threw her arms about her husband's
+neck. He was astonished to see that her eyes were filled with tears.
+
+"Oh, Hugh," she cried, "it's too perfect! It almost makes me afraid."
+
+"We will be very happy, dearest," he said, and as he kissed her he
+laughed at the fates.
+
+"I hope so--I pray so," she said, as she clung to him. "But--don't
+laugh,--I can't bear it."
+
+He patted her cheek.
+
+"What a strange little girl you are!" he said. "I suppose I shouldn't be
+mad about you if you weren't that way. Sometimes I wonder how many women
+I have married."
+
+She smiled at him through her tears.
+
+"Isn't that polygamy, Hugh?" she asked.
+
+It was all like a breathless tale out of one of the wonder books of
+youth. So, at least, it seemed to Honora as she stood, refreshed with a
+new white linen gown, hesitating on the threshold of her door before
+descending. Some time the bell must ring, or the cock crow, or the fairy
+beckon with a wand, and she would have to go back. Back where? She did
+not know--she could not remember. Cinderella dreaming by the embers,
+perhaps.
+
+He was awaiting her in the little breakfast room, its glass casements
+open to the garden with the wall and the round stone seat. The simmering
+urn, the white cloth, the shining silver, the big green melons that the
+hot summer sun had ripened for them alone, and Hugh's eyes as they rested
+on her--such was her illusion. Nor was it quite dispelled when he lighted
+a pipe and they started to explore their Eden, wandering through chambers
+with, low ceilings in the old part of the house, and larger, higher
+apartments in the portion that was called new. In the great darkened
+library, side by side against the Spanish leather on the walls, hung the
+portraits of his father and mother in heavy frames of gilt.
+
+Her husband was pleased that she should remain so long before them. And
+for a while, as she stood lost in contemplation, he did not speak. Once
+she glanced at him, and then back at the stern face of the General,
+--stern, yet kindly. The eyes, deep-set under bushy brows, like Hugh's,
+were full of fire; and yet the artist had made them human, too. A dark,
+reddish brown, close-trimmed mustache and beard hid the mouth and chin.
+Hugh had inherited the nose, but the father's forehead was wider and
+fuller. Hugh was at once a newer type, and an older. The face and figure
+of the General were characteristic of the mid-century American of the
+northern states, a mixture of boldness and caution and Puritanism, who
+had won his battles in war and commerce by a certain native quality of
+mind.
+
+"I never appreciated him," said Hugh at length, "until after he died
+--long after. Until now, in fact. At times we were good friends, and then
+something he would say or do would infuriate me, and I would purposely
+make him angry. He had a time and a rule for everything, and I could not
+bear rules. Breakfast was on the minute, an hour in his study to attend
+to affairs about the place, so many hours in his office at the mills, in
+the president's room at the bank, vestry and charity meetings at regular
+intervals. No movement in all this country round about was ever set on
+foot without him. He was one to be finally reckoned with. And since his
+death, many proofs have come to me of the things he did for people of
+which the world was ignorant. I have found out at last that his way of
+life was, in the main, the right way. But I know now, Honora," he added
+soberly, slipping his hand within her arm, "I know now that without you I
+never could do all I intend to do."
+
+"Oh, don't say that!" she cried. "Don't say that!"
+
+"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her vehemence. "It is not a confession of
+weakness. I had the determination, it is true. I could--I should have
+done something, but my deeds would have lacked the one thing needful to
+lift them above the commonplace--at least for me. You are the
+inspiration. With you here beside me, I feel that I can take up this work
+with joy. Do you understand?"
+
+She pressed his hand with her arm.
+
+"Hugh," she said slowly, "I hope that I shall be a help, and not--not a
+hindrance."
+
+"A hindrance!" he exclaimed. "You don't know, you can't realize, what you
+are to me."
+
+She was silent, and when she lifted her eyes it was to rest them on the
+portrait of his mother. And she seemed to read in the sweet, sad eyes a
+question--a question not to be put into words. Chiltern, following her
+gaze, did not speak: for a space they looked at the portrait together,
+and in silence . . . .
+
+From one end of the house to the other they went, Hugh reviving at the
+sight of familiar objects a hundred memories of his childhood; and she
+trying to imagine that childhood, so different from her own, passed in
+this wonderful place. In the glass cases of the gun room, among the
+shining, blue barrels which he had used in all parts of the world, was
+the little shotgun his father had had made for him when he was twelve
+years old. Hugh locked the door after them when they came out, and smiled
+as he put the key in his pocket.
+
+"My destroying days are over," he declared.
+
+Honora put on a linen hat and they took the gravelled path to the
+stables, where the horses, one by one, were brought out into the
+courtyard for their inspection. In anticipation of this hour there was a
+blood bay for Honora, which Chiltern had bought in New York. She gave a
+little cry of delight when she saw the horse shining in the sunlight, his
+nostrils in the air, his brown eyes clear, his tapering neck patterned
+with veins. And then there was the dairy, with the fawn-coloured cows and
+calves; and the hillside pastures that ran down to the river, and the
+farm lands where the stubbled grain was yellowing. They came back by the
+path that wound through the trees and shrubbery bordering the lake to the
+walled garden, ablaze in the mellow sunlight with reds and purples,
+salvias and zinnias, dahlias, gladioli, and asters.
+
+Here he left her for a while, sitting dreamily on the stone bench. Mrs.
+Hugh Chiltern, of Grenoble! Over and over she repeated that name to
+herself, and it refused somehow to merge with her identity. Yet was she
+mistress of this fair domain; of that house which had sheltered them race
+for a century, and the lines of which her eye caressed with a loving
+reverence; and the Chiltern pearls even then lay hidden around her
+throat.
+
+Her thoughts went back, at this, to the gentle lady to whom they had
+belonged, and whose look began again to haunt her. Honora's superstition
+startled her. What did it mean, that look? She tried to recall where she
+had seen it before, and suddenly remembered that the eyes of the old
+butler had held something not unlike it. Compassionate--this was the only
+word that would describe it. No, it had not proclaimed her an intruder,
+though it may have been ready to do so the moment before her appearance;
+for there was a note of surprise in it--surprise and compassion.
+
+This was the lady in whose footsteps she was to walk, whose charities and
+household cares she was to assume! Tradition, order, observance,
+responsibility, authority it was difficult to imagine these as a logical
+part of the natural sequence of her life. She would begin to-day, if God
+would only grant her these things she had once contemned, and that seemed
+now so precious. Her life--her real life would begin to-day. Why not? How
+hard she would strive to be worthy of this incomparable gift! It was
+hers, hers! She listened, but the only answer was the humming of the bees
+in the still September morning.
+
+Chiltern's voice aroused her. He was standing in the breakfast room
+talking to the old butler.
+
+"You're sure there were no other letters, Starling, besides these bills?"
+
+Honora became tense.
+
+"No, sir," she heard the butler say, and she seemed to detect in his
+deferential voice the note of anxiety suppressed in the other's. "I'm
+most particular about letters, sir, as one who lived so many years with
+your father would be. All that came were put in your study, Mr. Hugh."
+
+"It doesn't matter," answered Chiltern, carelessly, and stepped out into
+the garden. He caught sight of her, hesitated the fraction of a moment,
+and as he came forward again the cloud in his eyes vanished. And yet she
+was aware that he was regarding her curiously.
+
+"What," he said gayly, "still here?"
+
+"It is too beautiful!" she cried. "I could sit here forever."
+
+She lifted her face trustfully, smilingly, to his, and he stooped down
+and kissed it . . . .
+
+To give the jealous fates not the least chance to take offence, the
+higher life they were to lead began at once. And yet it seemed at times
+to Honora as though this higher life were the gift the fates would most
+begrudge: a gift reserved for others, the pretensions to which were a
+kind of knavery. Merriment, forgetfulness, music, the dance; the cup of
+pleasure and the feast of Babylon--these might more readily have been
+vouchsafed; even deemed to have been bargained for. But to take that
+which supposedly had been renounced--virtue, sobriety, security, respect
+--would this be endured? She went about it breathlessly, like a thief.
+
+Never was there a more exemplary household. They rose at half-past seven,
+they breakfasted at a quarter after eight; at nine, young Mr. Manning,
+the farm superintendent, was in waiting, and Hugh spent two or more hours
+in his company, inspecting, correcting, planning; for two thousand acres
+of the original Chiltern estate still remained. Two thousand acres which,
+since the General's death, had been at sixes and sevens. The General's
+study, which was Hugh's now, was piled high with new and bulky books on
+cattle and cultivation of the soil. Government and state and private
+experts came and made tests and went away again; new machinery arrived,
+and Hugh passed hours in the sun, often with Honora by his side,
+installing it. General Chiltern had been president and founder of the
+Grenoble National Bank, and Hugh took up his duties as a director.
+
+Honora sought, with an energy that had in it an element of desperation,
+to keep pace with her husband. For she was determined that he should have
+no interests in which she did not share. In those first days it was her
+dread that he might grow away from her, and instinct told her that now or
+never must the effort be made. She, too, studied farming; not from books,
+but from him. In their afternoon ride along the shady river road, which
+was the event of her day, she encouraged him to talk of his plans and
+problems, that he might thus early form the habit of bringing them to
+her. And the unsuspecting male in him responded, innocent of the simple
+subterfuge. After an exhaustive discourse on the elements lacking in the
+valley soil, to which she had listened in silent intensity, he would
+exclaim:
+
+"By George, Honora, you're a continual surprise to me. I had no idea a
+woman would take an interest in these things, or grasp them the way you
+do."
+
+Lordly commendations these, and she would receive them with a flush of
+gratitude.
+
+Nor was it ever too hot, or she too busy with household cares, for her to
+follow him to the scene of his operations, whatever these might be: she
+would gladly stand for an hour listening to a consultation with the
+veterinary about an ailing cow. Her fear was lest some matter of like
+importance should escape her. She had private conversations with Mr.
+Manning, that she might surprise her husband by an unsuspected knowledge.
+Such were her ruses.
+
+The housekeeper who had come up from New York was the subject of a
+conjugal conversation.
+
+"I am going to send her away, Hugh," Honora announced. "I don't believe
+---your mother had one."
+
+The housekeeper's departure was the beginning of Honora's real intimacy
+with Starling. Complicity, perhaps, would be a better word for the
+commencement of this relationship. First of all, there was an inspection
+of the family treasures: the table-linen, the silver, and the china
+--Sevres, Royal Worcester, and Minton, and the priceless dinner-set, of
+Lowestoft which had belonged to Alexander Chiltern, reserved, for great
+occasions only: occasions that Starling knew by heart; their dates, and
+the guests the Lowestoft had honoured. His air was ceremonial as he laid,
+reverently, the sample pieces on the table before her, but it seemed to
+Honora that he spoke as one who recalls departed glories, who held a
+conviction that the Lowestoft would never be used again.
+
+Although by unalterable custom he submitted, at breakfast, the menus of
+the day to Hugh, the old butler came afterwards to Honora's boudoir
+during her struggle with the account books. Sometimes she would look up
+and surprise his eyes fixed upon her, and one day she found at her elbow
+a long list made out in a painstaking hand.
+
+"What's this, Starling?" she asked.
+
+"If you please, madame," he answered, "they're the current prices in the
+markets--here."
+
+She thanked him. Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon the
+locality lost upon her. That he realized the magnitude--for her--of the
+task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with the
+spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had said so.
+He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once recognizing
+her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that ignorance was a
+shameful thing not to be spoken of. Speculations upon him were
+irresistible. She was continually forgetting the nature of his situation,
+and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble of the past. She
+knew his principles as well as though he had spoken them--which he never
+did. For him, the world had become awry; he abhorred divorce, and that
+this modern abomination had touched the house of Chiltern was a calamity
+that had shaken the very foundations of his soul. In spite of this, he
+had remained. Why? Perhaps from habit, perhaps from love of the family
+and Hugh,--perhaps to see!
+
+And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,--of that she was
+sure,--and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved. He was as
+one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of which
+he never for an instant doubted. And he gave Honora the impression that
+he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and revealed
+the end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES
+
+Honora paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white
+skirt that her maid presented.
+
+"I think I'll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde," she said.
+
+The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun
+with the opening of her eyes that morning. It was Sunday, and the time
+was at hand when she must face the world. Might it not be delayed a
+little while--a week longer? For the remembrance of the staring eyes
+which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled
+her. It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold
+such terrors for her: to-day she had a longing for it that she had never
+felt in her life before.
+
+Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with
+him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious
+when she appeared, smilingly, at the door.
+
+"Why, you're all dressed up," he said.
+
+"It's Sunday, Hugh."
+
+"So it is," he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness--she
+could not tell.
+
+"I'm going to church," she said bravely.
+
+"I can't say much for old Stopford," declared her husband. "His sermons
+used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them."
+
+She poured out his coffee.
+
+"I suppose one has to take one's clergyman as one does the weather," she
+said. "We go to church for something else besides the sermon--don't we?"
+
+"I suppose so, if we go at all," he replied. "Old Stopford imposes a
+pretty heavy penalty."
+
+"Too heavy for you?" she asked, and smiled at him as she handed him the
+cup.
+
+"Too heavy for me," he said, returning her smile. "To tell you the truth,
+Honora, I had an overdose of church in my youth, here and at school, and
+I've been trying to even up ever since."
+
+"You'd like me to go, wouldn't you, Hugh?" she ventured, after a silence.
+
+"Indeed I should," he answered, and again she wondered to what extent his
+cordiality was studied, or whether it were studied at all. "I'm very fond
+of that church, in spite of the fact that--that I may be said to
+dissemble my fondness." She laughed with him, and he became serious. "I
+still contribute--the family's share toward its support. My father was
+very proud of it, but it is really my mother's church. It was due to her
+that it was built."
+
+Thus was comedy played--and Honora by no the means sure that it was a
+comedy. Even her alert instinct had not been able to detect the acting,
+and the intervening hours were spent in speculating whether her fears had
+not been overdone. Nevertheless, under the eyes of Starling, at twenty
+minutes to eleven she stepped into the victoria with an outward courage,
+and drove down the shady avenue towards the gates. Sweet-toned bells were
+ringing as she reached the residence portion of the town, and subdued
+pedestrians in groups and couples made their way along the sidewalks.
+They stared at her; and she in turn, with heightened colour, stared at
+her coachman's back. After all, this first Sunday would be the most
+difficult.
+
+The carriage turned into a street arched by old elms, and flanked by the
+houses of the most prosperous townspeople. Some of these were of the
+old-fashioned, classic type, and others new examples of a national
+architecture seeking to find itself,--white and yellow colonial,
+roughcast modifications of the Shakespearian period, and nondescript
+mixtures of cobblestones and shingles. Each was surrounded by trim lawns
+and shrubbery. The church itself was set back from the street. It was of
+bluish stone, and half covered with Virginia creeper.
+
+At this point, had the opportunity for a secret retreat presented itself,
+Honora would have embraced it, for until now she had not realized the
+full extent of the ordeal. Had her arrival been heralded by sounding
+trumpets, the sensation it caused could not have been greater. In her
+Eden, the world had been forgotten; the hum of gossip beyond the gates
+had not reached her. But now, as the horses approached the curb, their
+restive feet clattering on the hard pavement, in the darkened interior of
+the church she saw faces turned, and entering worshippers pausing in the
+doorway. Something of what the event meant for Grenoble dawned upon her:
+something, not all; but all that she could bear.
+
+If it be true that there is no courage equal to that which a great love
+begets in a woman, Honora's at that moment was sublime. Her cheeks
+tingled, and her knees weakened under her as she ran the gantlet to the
+church door, where she was met by a gentleman on whose face she read
+astonishment unalloyed: amazement, perhaps, is not too strong a word for
+the sensation it conveyed to her, and it occurred to her afterwards that
+there was an element in it of outrage. It was a countenance peculiarly
+adapted to such an expression--yellow, smooth-shaven, heavy-jowled, with
+one drooping eye; and she needed not to be told that she had encountered,
+at the outset, the very pillar of pillars. The frock coat, the heavy
+watch chain, the square-toed boots, all combined to make a Presence.
+
+An instinctive sense of drama amongst the onlookers seemed to create a
+hush, as though these had been the unwilling witnesses to an approaching
+collision and were awaiting the crash. The gentleman stood planted in the
+inner doorway, his drooping eye fixed on hers.
+
+"I am Mrs. Chiltern," she faltered.
+
+He hesitated the fraction of an instant, but he somehow managed to make
+it plain that the information was superfluous. He turned without a word
+and marched majestically up the aisle before her to the fourth pew from
+the front on the right. There he faced about and laid a protesting hand
+on the carved walnut, as though absolving himself in the sight of his God
+and his fellow-citizens. Honora fell on her knees.
+
+She strove to calm herself by prayer: but the glances of a congregation
+focussed between her shoulder-blades seemed to burn her back, and the
+thought of the concentration of so many minds upon her distracted her
+own. She could think of no definite prayer. Was this God's tabernacle? or
+the market-place, and she at the tail of a cart? And was she not Hugh
+Chiltern's wife, entitled to his seat in the place of worship of his
+fathers? She rose from her knees, and her eyes fell on the softly glowing
+colours of a stained-glass window: In memoriam--Alicia Reyburn Chiltern.
+Hugh's mother, the lady in whose seat she sat.
+
+The organist, a sprightly young man, came in and began turning over his
+music, and the choir took their-places, in the old-fashioned' manner.
+Then came the clergyman. His beard was white, his face long and narrow
+and shrivelled, his forehead protruding, his eyes of the cold blue of a
+winter's sky. The service began, and Honora repeated the familiar prayers
+which she had learned by heart in childhood--until her attention was
+arrested by the words she spoke: "We have offended against Thy holy
+laws." Had she? Would not God bless her marriage? It was not until then
+that she began to pray with an intensity that blotted out the world that
+He would not punish her if she had done wrong in His sight. Surely, if
+she lived henceforth in fear of Him, He would let her keep this priceless
+love which had come to her! And it was impossible that He should regard
+it as an inordinate and sinful affection--since it had filled her life
+with light. As the wife of Hugh Chiltern she sought a blessing. Would God
+withhold it? He would not, she was sure, if they lived a sober and a
+righteous life. He would take that into account, for He was just.
+
+Then she grew calmer, and it was not until after the doctrinal sermon
+which Hugh had predicted that her heart began to beat painfully once
+more, when the gentleman who had conducted her to her seat passed her the
+plate. He inspired her with an instinctive fear; and she tried to
+imagine, in contrast, the erect and soldierly figure of General Chiltern
+performing the same office. Would he have looked on her more kindly?
+
+When the benediction was pronounced, she made her way out of the church
+with downcast eyes. The people parted at the door to let her pass, and
+she quickened her step, gained the carriage at last, and drove away
+--seemingly leaving at her back a buzz of comment. Would she ever have
+the courage to do it again?
+
+The old butler, as he flung open the doors at her approach, seemed to be
+scrutinizing her.
+
+"Where's Mr. Chiltern, Starling?" she asked.
+
+"He's gone for a ride, madame."
+
+Hugh had gone for a ride!
+
+She did not see him until lunch was announced, when he came to the table
+in his riding clothes. It may have been that he began to talk a little
+eagerly about the excursion he had made to an outlying farm and the
+conversation he had had with the farmer who leased it.
+
+"His lease is out in April," said Chiltern, "and when I told him I
+thought I'd turn the land into the rest of the estate he tried to bribe
+me into a renewal."
+
+"Bribe you?"
+
+Chiltern laughed.
+
+"Only in joke, of course. The man's a character, and he's something of a
+politician in these parts. He intimated that there would be a vacancy in
+this congressional district next year, that Grierson was going to resign,
+and that a man with a long purse who belonged to the soil might have a
+chance. I suppose he thinks I would buy it."
+
+"And--would you like to go to Congress, Hugh?"
+
+"Well," he said, smiling, "a man never can tell when he may have to eat
+his words. I don't say I shouldn't--in the distant future. It would have
+pleased the General. But if I go," he added with characteristic vigour,
+"it will be in spite of the politicians, not because of them. If I go I
+shan't go bound, and I'll fight for it. I should enjoy that."
+
+And she was able to accord him the smile of encouragement he expected.
+
+"I am sure you would," she replied. "I think you might have waited until
+this afternoon and taken me," she reproached him. "You know how I enjoy
+going with you to those places."
+
+It was not until later in the meal that he anticipated, in an admirably
+accidental manner, the casual remark she had intended to make about
+church.
+
+"Your predictions were fulfilled," she answered; "the sermon wasn't
+thrilling."
+
+He glanced at her. And instead of avoiding his eyes, she smiled into
+them.
+
+"Did you see the First Citizen of Grenoble?" he inquired.
+
+"I am sure of it," she laughed, "if he's yellow, with a drooping eye and
+a presence; he was kind enough to conduct me to the pew."
+
+"Yes," he exclaimed, "that's Israel Simpson--you couldn't miss him. How I
+used to hate him when I was a boy! I haven't quite got over it yet. I
+used to outdo myself to make things uncomfortable for him when he came up
+here--I think it was because he always seemed to be truckling. He was
+ridiculously servile and polite in those days. He's changed since," added
+Hugh, dryly. "He must quite have forgotten by this time that the General
+made him."
+
+"Is--is he so much?" said Honora.
+
+Her husband laughed.
+
+"Is it possible that you have seen him and still ask that?" said he. "He
+is Grenoble. Once the Chilterns were. He is the head of the honoured firm
+of Israel Simpson and Sons, the president of the Grenoble National Bank,
+the senior warden of the church, a director in the railway. Twice a year,
+in the columns of the New York newspapers dedicated to the prominent
+arrivals at the hotels, you may read the name of Israel Simpson of
+Grenoble. Three times has he been abroad, respectably accompanied by
+Maria, who invariably returns to read a paper on the cathedrals and art
+before the Woman's Club."
+
+Maria is his wife, I suppose."
+
+"Yes. Didn't you run across Maria? She's quite as pronounced, in her way,
+as Israel. A very tower of virtue."
+
+"I didn't meet anybody, Hugh," said Honora. "I'll--I'll look for her next
+Sunday. I hurried out. It was a little embarrassing the first time," she
+added, "your family being so prominent in Grenoble."
+
+Upon this framework, the prominence of his family, she built up during
+the coning week a new structure of hope. It was strange she had never
+thought before of this quite obvious explanation for the curiosity of
+Grenoble. Perhaps--perhaps it was not prejudice, after all--or not all of
+it. The wife of the Chiltern heir would naturally inspire a considerable
+interest in any event, and Mrs. Hugh Chiltern in particular. And these
+people would shortly understand, if they did not now understand, that
+Hugh had come back voluntarily and from a sense of duty to assume the
+burdens and responsibilities that so many of his generation and class had
+shirked. This would tell in their favour, surely. At this point in her
+meditations she consulted the mirror, to behold a modest, slim-waisted
+young woman becomingly arrayed in white linen, whose cheeks were aglow
+with health, whose eyes seemingly reflected the fire of a distant high
+vision. Not a Poppaea, certainly, nor a Delila. No, it was unbelievable
+that this, the very field itself of their future labours, should be
+denied them. Her heart, at the mere conjecture, turned to stone.
+
+During the cruise of the Adhemar she had often watched, in the gathering
+darkness, those revolving lights on headland or shoal that spread now a
+bright band across the sea, and again left the waters desolate in the
+night. Thus, ceaselessly revolving from white hope to darker doubt, were
+her thoughts, until sometimes she feared to be alone with them, and
+surprised him by her presence in his busiest moments. For he was going
+ahead on the path they had marked out with a faith in which she could
+perceive no flaw. If faint and shadowy forms had already come between
+them, he gave no evidence of having as yet discerned these. There was the
+absence of news from his family, for instance,--the Graingers, the
+Stranger, the Shorters, and the Pendletons, whom she had never seen; he
+had never spoken to her of this, and he seemed to hold it as of no
+account. Her instinct whispered that it had left its mark, a hidden mark.
+And while she knew that consideration for her prompted him to hold his
+peace, she told herself that she would have been happier had he spoken of
+it.
+
+Always she was brought back to Grenoble when she saw him thus, manlike,
+with his gaze steadily fixed on the task. If New York itself withheld
+recognition, could Grenoble--provincial and conservative Grenoble,
+preserving still the ideas of the last century for which his family had
+so unflinchingly stood--be expected to accord it? New York! New York was
+many, many things, she knew. The great house could have been filled from
+weekend to week-end from New York; but not with Graingers and Pendletons
+and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose fortresses the
+currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with those who, while
+not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not with those whose
+assured future was that for which she might have sold her soul itself.
+Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men; those who lived in
+the world of fashion but were not squeamish--Mrs. Kame, for example; and
+ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried a second throw for
+happiness,--such votaries of excitement would undoubtedly have been more
+than glad to avail themselves of the secluded hospitality of Grenoble for
+that which they would have been pleased to designate as "a lively time."
+Honora shuddered at the thought: And, as though the shudder had been
+prophetic, one morning the mail contained a letter from Mrs. Kame
+herself.
+
+Mercifully Hugh had not noticed it. Honora did not recognize the
+handwriting, but she slipped the envelope into her lap, fearful of what
+it might contain, and, when she gained the privacy of her rooms, read it
+with quickening breath. Mrs. Kame's touch was light and her imagination
+sympathetic; she was the most adaptable of the feminine portion of her
+nation, and since the demise of her husband she had lived, abroad and at
+home, among men and women of a world that does not dot its i's or cross
+its t's. Nevertheless, the letter filled Honora with a deep apprehension
+and a deeper resentment. Plainly and clearly stamped between its
+delicately worded lines was the claim of a comradeship born of Honora's
+recent act. She tore the paper into strips and threw it into the flames
+and opened the window to the cool air of the autumn morning. She had a
+feeling of contamination that was intolerable.
+
+Mrs. Kame had proposed herself--again the word "delicately" must be used
+--for one of Honora's first house-parties. Only an acute perception could
+have read in the lady's praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of that part
+of his career already registered on the social slate. Mrs. Kame had
+thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these autumn days at
+Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would be a sacrilege.
+Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of their friends, and
+throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long closed to the world.
+And--without the air of having picked the single instance, but of having
+chosen from many--Mrs. Kame added that she had only lately seen Elsie
+Shorter, whose admiration for Honora was greater than ever. A sentiment,
+Honora reflected a little bitterly, that Mrs. Shorter herself had not
+taken the pains to convey. Consistency was not Elsie's jewel.
+
+It must perhaps be added for the sake of enlightenment that since going
+to Newport Honora's view of the writer of this letter had changed. In
+other words, enlarging ideals had dwarfed her somewhat; it was strictly
+true that the lady was a boon companion of everybody. Her Catholicism had
+two limitations only: that she must be amused, and that she must not--in
+what she deemed the vulgar sense--be shocked.
+
+Honora made several attempts at an answer before she succeeded in saying,
+simply, that Hugh was too absorbed in his work of reconstruction of the
+estate for them to have house-parties this autumn. And even this was a
+concession hard for her pride to swallow. She would have preferred not to
+reply at all, and this slightest of references to his work--and hers
+--seemed to degrade it. Before she folded the sheet she looked again at
+that word "reconstruction" and thought of eliminating it. It was too
+obviously allied to "redemption"; and she felt that Mrs. Kame could not
+understand redemption, and would ridicule it. Honora went downstairs and
+dropped her reply guiltily into the mail-bag. It was for Hugh's sake she
+was sending it, and from his eyes she was hiding it.
+
+And, while we are dealing with letters, one, or part of one, from
+Honora's aunt, may perhaps be inserted here. It was an answer to one that
+Honora had written a few days after her installation at Grenoble, the
+contents of which need not be gone into: we, who know her, would neither
+laugh nor weep at reading it, and its purport may be more or less
+accurately surmised from her aunt's reply.
+
+   "As I wrote you at the time, my dear,"--so it ran "the shock which
+   your sudden marriage with Mr. Chiltern caused us was great--so great
+   that I cannot express it in words. I realize that I am growing old,
+   and perhaps the world is changing faster than I imagine. And I
+   wrote you, too, that I would not be true to myself if I told you
+   that what you have done was right in my eyes. I have asked myself
+   whether my horror of divorce and remarriage may not in some degree
+   be due to the happiness of my life with your uncle. I am,
+   undoubtedly, an exceptionally fortunate woman; and as I look
+   backwards I see that the struggles and trials which we have shared
+   together were really blessings.
+
+   "Nevertheless, dear Honora, you are, as your uncle wrote you, our
+   child, and nothing can alter that fact in our hearts. We can only
+   pray with all our strength that you may find happiness and peace in
+   your new life. I try to imagine, as I think of you and what has
+   happened to you in the few years since you have left us--how long
+   they seem!--I try to imagine some of the temptations that have
+   assailed you in that world of which I know nothing. If I cannot, it
+   is because God made us different. I know what you have suffered,
+   and my heart aches for you.
+
+   "You say that experience has taught you much that you could not
+   have--learned in any other way. I do not doubt it. You tell me
+   that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one. Let me
+   repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon
+   sand, that regrets may not come. I cannot say more. I cannot
+   dissemble. Perhaps I have already said too much.
+
+                  "Your loving
+
+                       "AUNT MARY."
+
+An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the
+steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake. Unconsciously she repeated the
+words to herself:
+
+"Builded upon sand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER
+
+Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went. A bewildering, ever
+changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck
+first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a
+wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the
+faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed. Thus the slopes
+were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival. Sometimes Honora,
+watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge,
+and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake
+and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again,
+shivering, at nightfall. In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent
+save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their
+horses' feet.
+
+So the Indian summer passed--that breathless season when even happiness
+has its premonitions and its pangs. The umber fields, all ploughed and
+harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening
+spring. Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the
+valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made
+pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against
+Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.
+Sometimes she listened to it in the night.
+
+She was watching. How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her
+senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer. Now, she felt, was the
+crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the
+balance. The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but
+little time for thought, had relaxed. In these wet days had he begun to
+brood a little? Did he show signs of a reversion to that other
+personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had
+had? She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the
+Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having
+looked on a superimposed portrait. That Chiltern which she called her
+Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved most
+of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by. The life
+of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open. Was he dead,
+or sleeping? And if sleeping, would he awake? How softly she tread!
+
+And in these days, with what exquisite, yet tremulous skill and courage
+did she bring up the subject of that other labour they were to undertake
+together--the life and letters of his father. In the early dusk, when
+they had returned from their long rides, she contrived to draw Chiltern
+into his study. The cheerfulness, the hopefulness, the delight with which
+she approached the task, the increasing enthusiasm she displayed for the
+character of the General as she read and sorted the letters and
+documents, and the traits of his she lovingly traced in Hugh, were not
+without their effect. It was thus she fanned, ceaselessly and with a
+smile, and with an art the rarest women possess, the drooping flame. And
+the flame responded.
+
+How feverishly she worked, unknown to him, he never guessed; so carefully
+and unobtrusively planted her suggestions that they were born again in
+glory as his inspiration. The mist had lifted a little, and she beheld
+the next stage beyond. To reach that stage was to keep him intent on this
+work--and--after that, to publish! Ah, if he would only have patience, or
+if she could keep him distracted through this winter and their night, she
+might save him. Love such as hers can even summon genius to its aid, and
+she took fire herself at the thought of a book worthy of that love, of a
+book--though signed by him that would redeem them, and bring a scoffing
+world to its knees in praise. She spent hours in the big library
+preparing for Chiltern's coming, with volumes in her lap and a note-book
+by her side.
+
+One night, as they sat by the blazing logs in his study, which had been
+the General's, Chiltern arose impulsively, opened the big safe in the
+corner, and took out a leather-bound book and laid it on her lap. Honora
+stared at it: it was marked: Highlawns, Visitors' Book."
+
+"It's curious I never thought of it before," he said, "but my father, had
+a habit of jotting down notes in it on important occasions. It may be of
+some use to us Honora."
+
+She opened it at random and read: "July 5, 1893, Picnic at Psalter's
+Falls. Temperature 71 at 9 A.M. Bar. 30. Weather clear. Charles left for
+Washington, summons from President, in the midst of it. Agatha and Victor
+again look at the Farrar property. Hugh has a ducking. P.S. At dinner
+night Bessie announces her engagement to Cecil Grainger. Present Sarah
+and George Grenfell, Agatha and Victor Strange, Gerald Shorter, Lord
+Kylie--"
+
+Honora looked up. Hugh was at her shoulder, with his eyes on the page.
+
+"Psalter's Falls!" he exclaimed. "How well I remember that day! I was
+just home from my junior year at Harvard."
+
+"Who was 'Charles'?" inquired Honora.
+
+"Senator Pendleton--Bessie's father. Just after I jumped into the
+mill-pond the telegram came for him to go to Washington, and I drove him
+home in my wet clothes. The old man had a terrible tongue, a whip-lash
+kind of humour, and he scored me for being a fool. But he rather liked
+me, on the whole. He told me if I'd only straighten out I could be
+anything, in reason."
+
+"What made you jump in the mill-pond?" Honora asked, laughing.
+
+"Bessie Grainger. She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she
+always kept her head, and I didn't." He smiled. "I'm willing to admit
+that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously. We
+were standing on the bridge--I remember it as though it were yesterday
+--and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand bottom. She
+took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn't get it if she threw it in.
+That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was a pause in the
+conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil Grainger. It turned
+out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I rescued. I could have wrung
+his neck, and I didn't speak to her for a month."
+
+Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident. With his arm
+over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of guests
+which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns passed
+before her eyes. Distinguished foreigners, peers of England, churchmen,
+and men renowned in literature: famous American statesmen, scientists,
+and names that represented more than one generation of wealth and
+achievement--all were here. There were his school and college friends,
+five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls who were
+now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or Newport.
+
+Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe. To her
+sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant. There were other
+and blank pages in it for future years; and under different circumstances
+he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the great table in
+the library.
+
+It was not until some weeks later that Honora was seated one afternoon in
+the study waiting for him to come in, and sorting over some of the
+letters that they had not yet examined, when she came across a new lot
+thrust carelessly at the bottom of the older pile. She undid the elastic.
+Tucked away in one of the envelopes she was surprised to find a letter of
+recent date--October. She glanced at it, read involuntarily the first
+lines, and then, with a little cry, turned it over. It was from Cecil
+Grainger. She put it back into the envelope whence it came, and sat
+still.
+
+After a while, she could not tell how long, she heard Hugh stamping the
+snow from his feet in the little entry beside the study. And in a few
+moments he entered, rubbing his hands and holding them out to the blaze.
+
+"Hello, Honora," he said; "are you still at it? What's the matter--a
+hitch?"
+
+She reached mechanically into the envelope, took out the letter, and
+handed it to him.
+
+"I found it just now, Hugh. I didn't read much of it--I didn't mean to
+read any. It's from Mr. Grainger, and you must have overlooked it."
+
+He took it.
+
+"From Cecil?" he said, in an odd voice. "I wasn't aware that he had sent
+me anything-recently."
+
+As he read, she felt the anger rise within him, she saw it in his eyes
+fixed upon the sheet, and the sense of fear, of irreparable loss, that
+had come over her as she had sat alone awaiting him, deepened. And yet,
+long expected verdicts are sometimes received in a spirit of
+recklessness: He finished the letter, and flung it in her lap.
+
+"Read it," he said.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she protested tremulously. "Perhaps--perhaps I'd better not."
+He laughed, and that frightened her the more. It was the laugh, she was
+sure, of the other man she had not known.
+
+"I've always suspected that Cecil was a fool--now I'm sure of it. Read
+it!" he repeated, in a note of command that went oddly with his next
+sentence; "You will find that it is only ridiculous."
+
+This assurance of the comedy it contained, however, did not serve to
+fortify her misgivings. It was written from a club.
+
+   "DEAR HUGH: Herewith a few letters for the magnum opus which I have
+   extracted from Aunt Agatha, Judge Gaines, and others, and to send
+   you my humble congratulations. By George, my boy, you have dashed
+   off with a prize, and no mistake. I've never made any secret, you
+   know, of my admiration for Honora--I hope I may call her so now.
+   And I just thought I'd tell you you could count on me for a friend
+   at court. Not that I'm any use now, old boy. I'll have to be frank
+   with you--I always was. Discreet silence, and all that sort of
+   thing: as much as my head is worth to open my mouth. But I had an
+   idea it would be an act of friendship to let you know how things
+   stand. Let time and works speak, and Cecil will give the thing
+   a push at the proper moment. I understand from one of the
+   intellectual journals I read that you have gone in for simple life
+   and scientific farming. A deuced canny move. And for the love of
+   heaven, old man, keep it up for a while, anyhow. I know it's
+   difficult, but keep it up. I speak as a friend.
+
+   "They received your letters all right, announcing your marriage.
+   You always enjoyed a row--I wish you could have been on hand to see
+   and hear this one. It was no place for a man of peace, and I spent
+   two nights at the club. I've never made any secret, you know, of
+   the fact that I think the Pendleton connection hide-bound. And you
+   understand Bessie--there's no good of my explaining her. You'd have
+   thought divorce a brand-new invention of the devil, instead of a
+   comparatively old institution. And if you don't mind my saying so,
+   my boy, you took this fence a bit on the run, the way you do
+   everything.
+
+   "The fact is, divorce is going out of fashion. Maybe it's because
+   the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces
+   against it; maybe its been a bit overdone. Most people who have
+   tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying-
+   pan--both hot as soon as they warm up. Of course, old boy, there's
+   nothing personal in this. Sit tight, and stick to the simple life--
+   that's your game as I see it. No news--I've never known things to
+   be so quiet. Jerry won over two thousand night before last--he made
+   it no trumps in his own hand four times running.
+
+               "Yours,
+
+                    "CECIL."
+
+Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he
+crushed it. There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act,
+and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of
+good-will. Whatever its wording, such it was. A dark red flush had
+mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+She was fighting for her presence of mind. Flashes of his temper she had
+known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger. Not
+his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now
+after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him
+before her very eyes. She had been able to cope with the new man, but she
+felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.
+
+"What do you expect me to say, Hugh?" she faltered, with a queer feeling
+that she was not addressing him.
+
+"Anything you like," he replied.
+
+"Defend Cecil."
+
+"Why should I defend him?" she said dully.
+
+"Because you have no pride."
+
+A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this insult
+reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice shrill
+with anguish. But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.
+
+"You couldn't be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d--d
+impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront,
+an implication that our marriage does not exist."
+
+She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later. That which
+slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense of
+danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted her
+as her husband. He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would
+overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.
+She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.
+
+"No,--I have no pride, Hugh,--it is gone. I have thought of you only. The
+fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends, and
+ruin your future has killed my pride. He--Mr. Grainger meant to be kind.
+He is always like that--it's his way of saying things. He wishes to show
+that he is friendly to you--to me--"
+
+"In spite of my relations," cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of the
+room. "They cease to be my relations from this day. I disown them. I say
+it deliberately. So long as I live, not one of them shall come into this
+house. All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up here
+and live the life my father did. Very well, now I've done it. And I wrote
+to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a gentleman
+and a decent citizen--more than some of them do. No, I wash my hands of
+them. If they were to crawl up here from the gate on their knees, I'd
+turn them out."
+
+Although he could not hear her, she continued to plead.
+
+"Hugh, try to think of how--how our marriage must have appeared to them.
+Not that I blame you for being angry. We only thought of one thing--our
+love--" her voice broke at the word, "and our own happiness. We did not
+consider others. It is that which sometimes has made me afraid, that we
+believed ourselves above the law. And now that we have--begun so well,
+don't spoil it, Hugh! Give them time, let them see by our works that we
+are in earnest, that we intend to live useful lives.
+
+"I don't mean to beg them," she cried, at sight of his eyes. "Oh, I don't
+mean that. I don't mean to entreat them, or even to communicate with
+them. But they are your flesh and blood--you must remember that. Let us
+prove that we are--not--like the others," she said, lifting her head,
+"and then it cannot matter to us what any one thinks. We shall have
+justified our act to ourselves."
+
+But he was striding up and down the room again. It was as she feared
+--her plea--had fallen on unheeding ears. A sudden convulsive leaping of
+the inner fires sent him to his desk, and he seized some note-paper from
+the rack. Honora rose to her feet, and took a step towards him.
+
+"Hugh--what are you going to do?"
+
+"Do!" he cried, swinging in his chair and facing her, "I'm going to do
+what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the
+circumstances. I'm going to do what I was a fool not to have done three
+months ago--what I should have done if it hadn't been for you. If in
+their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget
+what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me. If
+it's the last act of my life I'm going to tell them so."
+
+She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.
+He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the more
+terrible to her because of the white anger he felt. And still she stood.
+He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.
+
+"I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town in
+half an hour," he said.
+
+It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room. A mortal
+sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber and
+flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed: and the
+sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her
+universe. For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was
+excluded. Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began to
+practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a
+sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.
+
+Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned against
+her? On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith,
+discarded and scorned all other help. And at the first contact with that
+greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that
+strength had broken!
+
+Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had
+held up smiling heads. It was choked now by brambles that scratched her
+nakedness at every step. Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter
+it! "We have the right to happiness," he had said, and she had looked
+into his eyes and believed him. What was this strange, elusive happiness,
+that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that essence pure
+and unalloyed with baser things? Ecstasy, perhaps, she had found--for was
+it delirium? Fear was the boon companion of these; or better, the
+pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.
+
+Then, as though some one had turned on a light--a sickening, yet
+penetrating blue light--she looked at Hugh Chiltern. She did not wish to
+look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger
+than she. She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very
+sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on. And
+scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is
+called love could she discern. Love he possessed; that she had not
+doubted, and did not doubt, even now. But it had been given her to see
+that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow,
+perchance, after it had departed. Now she understood his anger; it was
+like the anger of a fiercely rushing river striving to break a dam and
+invade the lands below with devastating floods. All these months the
+waters had been mounting . . . .
+
+Turning at length from the consideration of this figure, she asked
+herself whether, if with her present knowledge she had her choice to make
+over again, she would have chosen differently. The answer was a startling
+negative. She loved him. Incomprehensible, unreasonable, and un reasoning
+sentiment! That she had received a wound, she knew; whether it were
+mortal, or whether it would heal and leave a scar, she could not say. One
+salient, awful fact she began gradually to realize, that if she sank back
+upon the pillows she was lost. Little it would profit her to save her
+body. She had no choice between her present precarious foothold and the
+abyss, and wounded as she was she would have to fight. There was no
+retreat:
+
+She sat up, and presently got to her feet and went to the window and
+stared through the panes until she distinguished the blue whiteness of
+the fallen snow on her little balcony. The night, despite the clouds, had
+a certain luminous quality. Then she drew the curtains, searched for the
+switch, and flooded the room with a soft glow--that beautiful room in
+which he had so proudly installed her four months before. She smoothed
+the bed, and walking to the mirror gazed intently at her face, and then
+she bathed it. Afterwards she opened her window again, admitting a flurry
+of snow, and stood for some minutes breathing in the sharp air.
+
+Three quarters of an hour later she was dressed and descending the
+stairs, and as she entered the library dinner was announced. Let us spare
+Honora the account of that repast or rather a recital of the conversation
+that accompanied it. What she found to say under the eyes of the servants
+is of little value, although the fact itself deserves to be commended as
+a high accomplishment; and while she talked, she studied the brooding
+mystery that he presented, and could make nothing of it. His mood was
+new. It was not sullenness, nor repressed rage; and his answers were
+brief, but he was not taciturn. It struck her that in spite of a
+concentration such as she had never in her life bestowed on any other
+subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married--was still
+wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of perfection of
+that knowledge her danger was great. Perhaps the Chiltern she had married
+was as yet in a formative state. Be this as it may, what she saw depicted
+on his face to-night corresponded to no former experience.
+
+They went back to the library. Coffee was brought and carried off, and
+Honora was standing before the fire. Suddenly he rose from his chair,
+crossed the room, and before she could draw away seized and crushed her
+in his arms without a word. She lay there, inert, bewildered as in the
+grip of an unknown force, until presently she was aware of the beating of
+his heart, and a glimmering of what he felt came to her. Nor was it an
+understandable thing, except to the woman who loved him. And yet and yet
+she feared it even in that instant of glory.
+
+When at last she dared to look up, he kissed away the tears from her
+cheeks.
+
+"I love you," he said. "You must never doubt it--do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, Hugh."
+
+"You must never doubt it," he repeated roughly.
+
+His contrition was a strange thing--if it were contrition. And love
+--woman's love--is sometimes the counsellor of wisdom. Her sole reproach
+was to return his kiss.
+
+Presently she chose a book, and he read to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY
+
+One morning, as he gathered up his mail, Chiltern left lying on the
+breakfast table a printed circular, an appeal from the trustees of the
+Grenoble Hospital. As Honora read it she remembered that this institution
+had been the favourite charity of his mother; and that Mrs. Chiltern, at
+her death, had bequeathed an endowment which at the time had been ample.
+But Grenoble having grown since then, the deficit for this year was
+something under two thousand dollars, and in a lower corner was a request
+that contributions be sent to Mrs. Israel Simpson.
+
+With the circular in her hand, Honora went thoughtfully up the stairs to
+her sitting-room. The month was February, the day overcast and muggy, and
+she stood for a while apparently watching the holes made in the snow by
+the steady drip from the cap of the garden wall. What she really saw was
+the face of Mrs. Israel Simpson, a face that had haunted her these many
+months. For Mrs. Simpson had gradually grown, in Honora's mind, to typify
+the hardness of heart of Grenoble. With Grenoble obdurate, what would
+become of the larger ambitions of Hugh Chiltern?
+
+Mrs. Simpson was indeed a redoubtable lady, whose virtue shone with a
+particular high brightness on the Sabbath. Her lamp was brimming with oil
+against the judgment day, and she was as one divinely appointed to be the
+chastener of the unrighteous. So, at least, Honora beheld her. Her attire
+was rich but not gaudy, and had the air of proclaiming the prosperity of
+Israel Simpson alone as its unimpeachable source: her nose was long, her
+lip slightly marked by a masculine and masterful emblem, and her eyes
+protruded in such a manner as to give the impression of watchfulness on
+all sides.
+
+It was this watchfulness that our heroine grew to regard as a salient
+characteristic. It never slept--even during Mr. Stopford's sermons. She
+was aware of it when she entered the church, and she was sure that it
+escorted her as far as the carriage on her departure. It seemed to
+oppress the congregation. And Honora had an idea that if it could have
+been withdrawn, her cruel proscription would have ended. For at times she
+thought that she read in the eyes of some of those who made way for her,
+friendliness and even compassion.
+
+It was but natural, perhaps, in the situation in which our heroine found
+herself, that she should have lost her sense of proportion to the extent
+of regarding this lady in the light of a remorseless dragon barring her
+only path to peace. And those who might have helped her--if any there
+were--feared the dragon as much as she. Mrs. Simpson undoubtedly would
+not have relished this characterization, and she is not to have the
+opportunity of presenting her side of the case. We are looking at it from
+Honora's view, and Honora beheld chimeras. The woman changed, for Honora,
+the very aspect of the house of God; it was she who appeared to preside
+there, or rather to rule by terror. And Honora, as she glanced at her
+during the lessons, often wondered if she realized the appalling extent
+of her cruelty. Was this woman, who begged so audibly to be delivered
+from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, in reality a Christian? Honora
+hated her, and yet she prayed that God would soften her heart. Was there
+no way in which she could be propitiated, appeased? For the sake of the
+thing desired, and which it was given this woman to withhold, she was
+willing to humble herself in the dust.
+
+Honora laid the hospital circular on the desk beside her account book.
+She had an ample allowance from Hugh; but lying in a New York bank was
+what remained of the unexpected legacy she had received from her father,
+and it was from this that she presently drew a cheque for five hundred
+dollars,--a little sacrifice that warmed her blood as she wrote. Not for
+the unfortunate in the hospital was she making it, but for him: and that
+she could do this from the little store that was her very own gave her a
+thrill of pride. She would never need it again. If he deserted her, it
+mattered little what became of her. If he deserted her!
+
+She sat gazing out of the window over the snow, and a new question was in
+her heart. Was it as a husband--that he loved her? Did their intercourse
+have that intangible quality of safety that belonged to married life? And
+was it not as a mistress rather than a wife that, in their isolation, she
+watched his moods so jealously? A mistress! Her lips parted, and she
+repeated the word aloud, for self-torture is human.
+
+Her mind dwelt upon their intercourse. There were the days they spent
+together, and the evenings, working or reading. Ah, but had the time ever
+been when, in the depths of her being, she had felt the real security of
+a wife? When she had not always been dimly conscious of a desire to
+please him, of a struggle to keep him interested and contented? And there
+were the days when he rode alone, the nights when he read or wrote alone,
+when her joy was turned to misery; there were the alternating periods of
+passion and alienation. Alienation, perhaps, was too strong a word.
+Nevertheless, at such times, her feeling was one of desolation.
+
+His heart, she knew, was bent upon success at Grenoble, and one of the
+books which they had recently read together was a masterly treatise, by
+an Englishman, on the life-work of an American statesman. The vast width
+of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was stirred with
+politics: a better era was coming, the pulse of the nation beating with
+renewed life; a stronger generation was arising to take the Republic into
+its own hands. A campaign was in progress in the State, and twice her
+husband had gone some distance to hear the man who embodied the new
+ideas, and had come back moody and restless, like a warrior condemned to
+step aside. Suppose his hopes were blighted--what would happen? Would the
+spirit of reckless adventure seize him again? Would the wilds call him?
+or the city? She did not dare to think.
+
+It was not until two mornings later that Hugh tossed her across the
+breakfast table a pink envelope with a wide flap and rough edges. Its
+sender had taken advantage of the law that permits one-cent stamps for
+local use.
+
+"Who's your friend, Honora?" he asked.
+
+She tried to look calmly at the envelope that contained her fate.
+
+"It's probably a dressmaker's advertisement," she answered, and went on
+with the pretence of eating her breakfast.
+
+"Or an invitation to dine with Mrs. Simpson," he suggested, laughingly,
+as he rose. "It's just the stationery she would choose."
+
+Honora dropped her spoon in her egg-cup. It instantly became evident,
+however, that his remark was casual and not serious, for he gathered up
+his mail and departed. Her hand trembled a little as she opened the
+letter, and for a moment the large gold monogram of its sender danced
+before her eyes.
+
+   "Dear Madam, Permit me to thank you in the name of the Trustees of
+   the Grenoble Hospital for your generous contribution, and believe
+   me, Sincerely yours,
+
+                  "MARIA W. SIMPSON."
+
+The sheet fluttered to the floor.
+
+When Sunday came, for the first time her courage failed her. She had
+heard the wind complaining in the night, and the day dawned wild and wet.
+She got so far as to put on a hat and veil and waterproof coat; Starling
+had opened the doors, and through the frame of the doorway, on the wet
+steps, she saw the footman in his long mackintosh, his umbrella raised to
+escort her to the carriage. Then she halted, irresolute. The impassive
+old butler stood on the sill, a silent witness, she knew, to the struggle
+going on within her. It seemed ridiculous indeed to play out the comedy
+with him, who could have recited the lines. And yet she turned to him.
+
+"Starling, you may send the coachman back to the stable."
+
+"Very good, madam."
+
+As she climbed the stairs she saw him gravely closing the doors. She
+paused on the landing, her sense of relief overborne by a greater sense
+of defeat. There was still time! She heard the wheels of the carriage on
+the circle--yet she listened to them die away. Starling softly caught the
+latch, and glanced up. For an instant their looks crossed, and she
+hurried on with palpitating breast, reached her boudoir, and closed the
+door. The walls seemed to frown on her, and she remembered that the
+sitting-room in St. Louis had worn that same look when, as a child, she
+had feigned illness in order to miss a day at school. With a leaden heart
+she gazed out on the waste of melting snow, and then tried in vain to
+read a novel that a review had declared amusing. But a question always
+came between her and the pages: was this the turning point of that silent
+but terrible struggle, when she must acknowledge to herself that the
+world had been too strong for her? After a while her loneliness became
+unbearable. Chiltern was in the library.
+
+"Home from church?" he inquired.
+
+"I didn't go, Hugh."
+
+He looked up in surprise.
+
+"Why, I thought I saw you start," he said.
+
+"It's such a dreary day, Hugh."
+
+"But that has never prevented you before."
+
+"Don't you think I'm entitled to one holiday?" she asked.
+
+But it was by a supreme effort she kept back the tears. He looked at her
+attentively, and got up suddenly and put his hands upon her shoulders.
+She could not meet his eyes, and trembled under his touch.
+
+"Honora," he said, "why don't you tell me the truth?"
+
+"What do you mean, Hugh?"
+
+"I have been wondering how long you'd stand it. I mean that these women,
+who call themselves Christians, have been brutal to you. They haven't so
+much as spoken to you in church, and not one of them has been to this
+house to call. Isn't that so?"
+
+"Don't let us judge them yet, Hugh," she begged, a little wildly, feeling
+again the gathering of another destroying storm in him that might now
+sweep the last vestige of hope away. And she seized the arguments as they
+came. "Some of them may be prejudiced, I know. But others--others I am
+sure are kind, and they have had no reason to believe I should like to
+know them--to work among them. I--I could not go to see them first, I am
+glad to wait patiently until some accident brings me near them. And
+remember, Hugh, the atmosphere in which we both lived before we came
+here--an atmosphere they regard as frivolous and pleasure-loving. People
+who are accustomed to it are not usually supposed to care to make friends
+in a village, or to bother their heads about the improvement of a
+community. Society is not what it was in your mother's day, who knew
+these people or their mothers, and took an interest in what they were
+doing. Perhaps they think me--haughty." She tried to smile. "I have never
+had an opportunity to show them that I am not."
+
+She paused, breathless, and saw that he was unconvinced.
+
+"Do you believe that, Honora?" he demanded.
+
+"I--I want to believe it. And I am sure, that if it is not true now, it
+will become so, if we only wait."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Never," he said, and dropped his hands and walked over to the fire. She
+stood where he had left her.
+
+"I understand," she heard him say, "I understand that you sent Mrs.
+Simpson five hundred dollars for the hospital. Simpson told me so
+yesterday, at the bank."
+
+"I had a little money of my own--from my father and I was glad to do it,
+Hugh. That was your mother's charity."
+
+Her self-control was taxed to the utmost by the fact that he was moved.
+She could not see his face, but his voice betrayed it.
+
+"And Mrs. Simpson?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+"Mrs. Simpson?"
+
+"She thanked you?"
+
+"She acknowledged the cheque, as president. I was not giving it to her,
+but to the hospital."
+
+"Let me see the letter."
+
+"I--I have destroyed it."
+
+He brought his hands together forcibly, and swung about and faced her.
+
+"Damn them!" he cried, "from this day I forbid you to have anything to do
+with them, do you hear. I forbid you! They're a set of confounded,
+self-righteous hypocrites. Give them time! In all conscience they have
+had time enough, and opportunity enough to know what our intentions are.
+How long do they expect us to fawn at their feet for a word of
+recognition? What have we done that we should be outlawed in this way by
+the very people who may thank my family for their prosperity? Where would
+Israel Simpson be to-day if my father had not set him up in business?
+Without knowing anything of our lives they pretend to sit in judgment on
+us. Why? Because you have been divorced, and I married you. I'll make
+them pay for this!"
+
+"No!" she begged, taking a step towards him. "You don't know what you're
+saying, Hugh. I implore you not to do anything. Wait a little while! Oh,
+it is worth trying!" So far the effort carried her, and no farther.
+Perhaps, at sight of the relentlessness in his eyes, hope left her, and
+she sank down on a chair and buried her face in her hands, her voice
+broken by sobs. "It is my fault, and I am justly punished. I have no
+right to you--I was wicked, I was selfish to marry you. I have ruined
+your life."
+
+He went to her, and lifted her up, but she was like a child whom
+passionate weeping has carried beyond the reach of words. He could say
+nothing to console her, plead as he might, assume the blame, and swear
+eternal fealty. One fearful, supreme fact possessed her, the wreck of
+Chiltern breaking against the rocks, driven there by her . . . .
+
+That she eventually grew calm again deserves to be set down as a tribute
+to the organism of the human body.
+
+That she was able to breathe, to move, to talk, to go through the
+pretence of eating, was to her in the nature of a mild surprise. Life
+went on, but it seemed to Honora in the hours following this scene that
+it was life only. Of the ability to feel she was utterly bereft. Her
+calmness must have been appalling: her own indifference to what might
+happen now,--if she could have realized it,--even more so. And in the
+afternoon, wandering about the house, she found herself in the
+conservatory. It had been built on against the library, and sometimes, on
+stormy afternoons, she had tea there with Hugh in the red-cushioned
+chairs beside the trickling fountain, the flowers giving them an illusion
+of summer.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances the sound of wheels on the gravel would have
+aroused her, for Hugh scarcely ever drove. And it was not until she
+glanced through the open doors into the library that she knew that a
+visitor had come to Highlawns. He stood beside the rack for the magazines
+and reviews, somewhat nervously fingering a heavy watch charm, his large
+silk hat bottom upward on the chair behind him. It was Mr. Israel
+Simpson. She could see him plainly, and she was by no means hidden from
+him by the leaves, and yet she did not move. He had come to see Hugh, she
+understood; and she was probably going to stay where she was and listen.
+It seemed of no use repeating to herself that this conversation would be
+of vital importance; for the mechanism that formerly had recorded these
+alarms and spread them, refused to work. She saw Chiltern enter, and she
+read on his face that he meant to destroy. It was no news to her. She had
+known it for a long, long time--in fact, ever since she had came to
+Grenoble. Her curiosity, strangely enough--or so it seemed
+afterwards--was centred on Mr. Simpson, as though he were an actor she
+had been very curious to see.
+
+It was this man, and not her husband, whom she perceived from the first
+was master of the situation. His geniality was that of the commander of
+an overwhelming besieging force who could afford to be generous. She
+seemed to discern the cloudy ranks of the legions behind him, and they
+encircled the world. He was aware of these legions, and their presence
+completely annihilated the ancient habit of subserviency with which in
+former years he had been wont to enter this room and listen to the
+instructions of that formidable old lion, the General: so much was plain
+from the orchestra. He went forward with a cheerful, if ponderous
+bonhomie.
+
+"Ah, Hugh," said he, "I got your message just in time. I was on the point
+of going over to see old Murdock. Seriously ill--you know--last time, I'm
+afraid," and Mr. Simpson shook his head. He held out his hand. Hugh did
+not appear to notice it.
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Simpson," he said.
+
+Mr. Simpson sat down. Chiltern took a stand before him.
+
+"You asked me the other day whether I would take a certain amount of the
+stock and bonds of the Grenoble Light and Power Company, in which you are
+interested, and which is, I believe, to supply the town with electric
+light, the present source being inadequate."
+
+"So I did," replied Mr. Simpson, urbanely, "and I believe the investment
+to be a good one. There is no better power in this part of the country
+than Psalter's Falls."
+
+"I wished to inform you that I do not intend to go into the Light and
+Power Company," said Chiltern.
+
+"I am sorry to hear it," Mr. Simpson declared. "In my opinion, if you
+searched the state for a more profitable or safer thing, you could not
+find it."
+
+"I have no doubt the investment is all that could be desired, Mr.
+Simpson. I merely wished you to know, as soon as possible, that I did not
+intend to put my money into it. There are one or two other little matters
+which you have mentioned during the week. You pointed out that it would
+be an advantage to Grenoble to revive the county fair, and you asked me
+to subscribe five thousand dollars to the Fair Association."
+
+This time Mr. Simpson remained silent.
+
+"I have come to the conclusion, to-day, not to subscribe a cent. I also
+intend to notify the church treasurer that I will not any longer rent a
+pew, or take any further interest in the affairs of St. John's church. My
+wife was kind enough, I believe, to send five hundred dollars to the
+Grenoble hospital. That will be the last subscription from any member of
+my family. I will resign as a director of the Grenoble Bank to-morrow,
+and my stock will be put on the market. And finally I wished to tell you
+that henceforth I do not mean to aid in any way any enterprise in
+Grenoble."
+
+During this announcement, which had been made with an ominous calmness,
+Mr. Simpson had gazed steadily at the brass andirons. He cleared his
+throat.
+
+"My dear Hugh," said he, "what you have said pains me
+excessively-excessively. I--ahem--fail to grasp it. As an old friend of
+your family--of your father--I take the liberty of begging you to
+reconsider your words."
+
+Chiltern's eyes blazed.
+
+"Since you have mentioned my father, Mr. Simpson," he exclaimed, "I may
+remind you that his son might reasonably have expected at your hands a
+different treatment than that you have accorded him. You have asked me to
+reconsider my decision, but I notice that you have failed to inquire into
+my reasons for making it. I came back here to Grenoble with every
+intention of devoting the best efforts of my life in aiding to build up
+the community, as my father had done. It was natural, perhaps, that I
+should expect a little tolerance, a little friendliness, a little
+recognition in return. My wife was prepared to help me. We did not ask
+much. But you have treated us like outcasts. Neither you nor Mrs.
+Simpson, from whom in all conscience I looked for consideration and
+friendship, have as much as spoken to Mrs. Chiltern in church. You have
+made it clear that, while you are willing to accept our contributions,
+you cared to have nothing to do with us whatever. If I have overstated
+the case, please correct me."
+
+Mr. Simpson rose protestingly.
+
+"My dear Hugh," he said. "This is very painful. I beg that you will spare
+me."
+
+"My name is Chiltern," answered Hugh, shortly. "Will you kindly explain,
+if you can, why the town of Grenoble has ignored us?"
+
+Israel Simpson hesitated a moment. He seemed older when he looked at
+Chiltern again, and in his face commiseration and indignation were oddly
+intermingled. His hand sought his watch chain.
+
+"Yes, I will tell you," he replied slowly, "although in all my life no
+crueller duty has fallen on me. It is because we in Grenoble are
+old-fashioned in our views of morality, and I thank God we are so. It is
+because you have married a divorced woman under circumstances that have
+shocked us. The Church to which I belong, and whose teachings I respect,
+does not recognize such a marriage. And you have, in my opinion,
+committed an offence against society. To recognize you by social
+intercourse would be to condone that offence, to open the door to
+practices that would lead, in a short time, to the decay of our people."
+
+Israel Simpson turned, and pointed a shaking forefinger at the portrait
+of General Augus Chiltern.
+
+"And I affirm here, fearlessly before you, that he, your father, would
+have been the last to recognize such a marriage."
+
+Chiltern took a step forward, and his fingers tightened.
+
+"You will oblige me by leaving my father's name out of this discussion,"
+he said.
+
+But Israel Simpson did not recoil.
+
+"If we learn anything by example in this world, Mr. Chiltern," he
+continued, "and it is my notion that we do, I am indebted to your father
+for more than my start in life. Through many years of intercourse with
+him, and contemplation of his character, I have gained more than riches.
+--You have forced me to say this thing. I am sorry if I have pained you.
+But I should not be true to the principles to which he himself was
+consistent in life, and which he taught by example so many others, if I
+ventured to hope that social recognition in Grenoble would be accorded
+you, or to aid in any way such recognition. As long as I live I will
+oppose it. There are, apparently, larger places in the world and less
+humble people who will be glad to receive you. I can only hope, as an old
+friend and well-wisher of your family, that you may find happiness."
+
+Israel Simpson fumbled for his hat, picked it up, and left the room. For
+a moment Chiltern stood like a man turned to stone, and then he pressed
+the button on the wall behind him.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7, by Winston Churchill
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+The Project Gutenberg Ebook A Modern Chronicle, v7, by Winston Churchill
+WC#43 in our series by Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston)
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+**EBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
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+*****These EBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers*****
+
+
+Title: A Modern Chronicle, Volume 7.
+
+Author: Winston Churchill (USA author, not Sir Winston Churchill)
+
+Release Date: March, 2004  [EBook #5380]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 28, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+
+
+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN CHRONICLE, V7, BY CHURCHILL ***
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+A MODERN CHRONICLE
+
+By Winston Churchill
+
+
+Volume 7.
+
+
+XI.       IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN
+XII.      THE ENTRANCE INTO EDEN
+XIII.     OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES.
+XIV.      CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER
+XV.       THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+IN WHICH IT IS ALL DONE OVER AGAIN
+
+All morning she had gazed on the shining reaches of the Hudson, their
+colour deepening to blue as she neared the sea.  A gold-bound volume of
+Shelley, with his name on the fly-leaf, lay in her lap.  And two lines
+she repeated softly to herself--two lines that held a vision:
+
+              "He was as the sun in his fierce youth,
+               As terrible and lovely as a tempest;"
+
+She summoned him out of the chaos of the past, and the past became the
+present, and he stood before her as though in the flesh.  Nay, she heard
+his voice, his laugh, she even recognized again the smouldering flames in
+his eyes as he glanced into hers, and his characteristic manners and
+gestures.  Honora wondered.  In vain, during those long months of exile
+had she tried to reconstruct him thus the vision in its entirety would
+not come: rare, fleeting, partial, and tantalizing glimpses she had been
+vouchsafed, it is true.  The whole of him had been withheld until this
+breathless hour before the dawn of her happiness.
+
+Yet, though his own impatient spirit had fared forth to meet her with
+this premature gift of his attributes, she had to fight the growing fear
+within her.  Now that the days of suffering were as they had not been,
+insistent questions dinned in her ears: was she entitled to the joys to
+come?  What had she done to earn them?  Had hers not been an attempt,
+on a gigantic scale, to cheat the fates?  Nor could she say whether this
+feeling were a wholly natural failure to grasp a future too big, or the
+old sense of the unreality of events that had followed her so
+persistently.
+
+The Hudson disappeared.  Factories, bridges, beflagged week-end resorts,
+ramshackle houses, and blocks of new buildings were scattered here and
+there.  The train was running on a causeway between miles of tenements
+where women and children, overtaken by lassitude, hung out of the
+windows: then the blackness of the tunnel, and Honora closed her eyes.
+Four minutes, three minutes, two minutes .  .  .  .  The motion ceased.
+At the steps of the car a uniformed station porter seized her bag; and
+she started to walk down the long, narrow platform.  Suddenly she halted.
+
+"Drop anything, Miss?" inquired the porter.
+
+"No," answered Honora, faintly.  He looked at her in concern, and she
+began to walk on again, more slowly.
+
+It had suddenly come over her that the man she was going to meet she
+scarcely knew!  Shyness seized her, a shyness that bordered on panic.
+And what was he really like, that she should put her whole trust in him?
+She glanced behind her: that way was closed: she had a mad desire to get
+away, to hide, to think.  It must have been an obsession that had
+possessed her all these months.  The porter was looking again, and he
+voiced her predicament.
+
+"There's only one way out, Miss."
+
+And then, amongst the figures massed behind the exit in the grill, she
+saw him, his face red-bronze with the sea tan, his crisp, curly head
+bared, his eyes alight with a terrifying welcome; and a tremor of a fear
+akin to ecstasy ran through her: the fear of the women of days gone by
+whose courage carried them to the postern or the strand, and fainted
+there.  She could have taken no step farther--and there was no need.  New
+strength flowed from the hand she held that was to carry her on and on.
+
+He spoke her name.  He led her passive, obedient, through the press to
+the side street, and then he paused and looked into her burning face.
+
+"I have you at last," he said.  "Are you happy?"
+
+"I don't know," she faltered.  "Oh, Hugh, it all seems so strange!
+I don't know what I have done."
+
+"I know," he said exultantly; "but to save my soul I can't believe it."
+
+She watched him, bewildered, while he put her maid into a cab, and by an
+effort roused herself.
+
+"Where are you going, Hugh?"
+
+"To get married," he replied promptly.
+
+She pulled down her veil.
+
+"Please be sensible," she implored.  "I've arranged to go to a hotel."
+
+"What hotel?"
+
+The--the Barnstable," she said.  The place had come to her memory on the
+train.  "It's very nice and--and quiet--so I've been told.  And I've
+telegraphed for my rooms."
+
+"I'll humour you this once," he answered, and gave the order.
+
+She got into the carriage.  It had blue cushions with the familiar smell
+of carriage upholstery, and the people in the street still hurried about
+their business as though nothing in particular were happening.  The
+horses started, and some forgotten key in her brain was touched as
+Chiltern raised her veil again.
+
+"You'll tear it, Hugh," she said, and perforce lifted it herself.  Her
+eyes met his--and she awoke.  Not to memories or regrets, but to the
+future, for the recording angel had mercifully destroyed his book.
+
+"Did you miss me?" she said.
+
+"Miss you!  My God, Honora, how can you ask?  When I look back upon these
+last months, I don't 'see how I ever passed through them.  And you are
+changed," he said.  "I could not have believed it possible, but you are.
+You are--you are finer."
+
+He had chosen his word exquisitely.  And then, as they trotted sedately
+through Madison Avenue, he strained her in his arms and kissed her.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, scarlet, as she disengaged, herself, "you mustn't
+--here!"
+
+"You're free!" he exclaimed.  "You're mine at last!  I can't believe it!
+Look at me, and tell me so."
+
+She tried.
+
+"Yes," she faltered.
+
+"Yes--what?"
+
+"Yes.  I--I am yours."
+
+She looked out of the window to avoid those eyes.  Was this New York, or
+Jerusalem?  Were these the streets through which she had driven and trod
+in her former life?  Her whole soul cried out denial.  No episode, no
+accusing reminiscences stood out--not one: the very corners were changed.
+Would it all change back again if he were to lessen the insistent
+pressure on the hand in her lap.
+
+"Honora?"
+
+"Yes?" she answered, with a start.
+
+"You missed me?  Look at me and tell me the truth."
+
+"The truth!" she faltered, and shuddered.  The contrast was too great--
+the horror of it too great for her to speak of.  The pen of Dante had not
+been adequate.  "Don't ask me, Hugh," she begged, "I can't talk about it
+--I never shall be able to talk about it.  If I had not loved you, I
+should have died."
+
+How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the
+quivering pressure on her hand.  Ah, if he had not!  If he had failed to
+grasp the meaning of her purgatory.
+
+"You are wonderful, Honora," was what he said in a voice broken by
+emotion.
+
+She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant of
+all her priceless possessions.  The carriage stopped, but it was some
+moments before they realized it.
+
+"You may come up in a little while," she whispered, "and lunch with me--
+if you like."
+
+"If I like!" he repeated.
+
+But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
+marble-lined area of the hotel.  A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and
+set the new universe to rocking.
+
+"Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume?  We have your telegram."
+
+Mrs. Leffingwell!  Who was that person?  For an instant she stood blankly
+holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
+"Mrs. Leffingwell and maid."  A pause.  Where was her home?  Then she
+added the words, "St. Louis."
+
+Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
+the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite.  While Mathilde,
+in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
+the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts.  Her spirits
+had unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her
+all these months overtaken her once more.  Never, never, she told
+herself, would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came
+she clung to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he
+could not understand it.
+
+"Hugh--you will care for me?" she cried.
+
+He kissed away her tears.  He could not follow her; he only knew that
+what he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before.
+Tender, and again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such
+miraculous delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an
+harmonious and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and
+sorrow,--of all the warring elements in the world.  What he felt was the
+supreme masculine joy of possession.
+
+At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had
+laid, for even the gods must eat.  Not that our deified mortals ate much
+on this occasion.  Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over
+gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to
+take shape in the mind of the man.  Presently he looked at his watch, and
+then at the woman, and made a suggestion.
+
+"Marry you now--this of afternoon!" she cried, aghast.  "Hugh, are you in
+your right senses?"
+
+"Yes," he said, "I'm reasonable for the first time in my life."
+
+She laughed, and immediately became serious.  But when she sought to
+marshal her arguments, she found that they had fled.
+
+"Oh, but I couldn't," she answered.  "And besides, there are so many
+things I ought to do.  I--I haven't any clothes."
+
+But this was a plea he could not be expected to recognize.  He saw no
+reason why she could not buy as many as she wanted after the ceremony.
+
+"Is that all?" he demanded.
+
+"No--that isn't all.  Can't you see that--that we ought to wait, Hugh?"
+
+"No," he exclaimed,
+
+"No I can't see it.  I can only see that every moment of waiting would
+be a misery for us both.  I can only see that the situation, as it is
+to-day, is an intolerable one for you."
+
+She had not expected him to see this.
+
+"There are others to be thought of," she said, after a moment's
+hesitation.
+
+"What others?"
+
+The answer she should have made died on her lips.
+
+"It seems so-indecorous, Hugh."
+
+"Indecorous!" he cried, and pushed back his chair and rose.  "What's
+indecorous about it?  To leave you here alone in a hotel in New York
+would not only be indecorous, but senseless.  How long would you put it
+off?  a week--a month--a year?  Where would you go in the meantime, and
+what would you do?"
+
+"But your friends, Hugh--and mine?"
+
+"Friends!  What have they got to do with it?"
+
+It was the woman, now, who for a moment turned practical--and for the
+man's sake.  She loved, and the fair fabric of the future which they were
+to weave together, and the plans with which his letters had been filled
+and of which she had dreamed in exile, had become to-day as the stuff of
+which moonbeams are made.  As she looked up at him, eternity itself did
+not seem long enough for the fulfilment of that love.  But he?  Would the
+time not come when he would demand something more? and suppose that
+something were denied?  She tried to rouse herself, to think, to consider
+a situation in which her instinct had whispered just once--there must be
+some hidden danger: but the electric touch of his hand destroyed the
+process, and made her incapable of reason.
+
+"What should we gain by a week's or a fortnight's delay," he was saying,
+"except so much misery?"
+
+She looked around the hotel sitting-room, and tried to imagine the
+desolation of it, stripped of his presence.  Why not?  There was reason
+in what he said.  And yet, if she had known it, it was not to reason she
+yielded, but to the touch of his hand.
+
+"We will be married to-day," he decreed.  "I have planned it all.
+I have bought the 'Adhemar', the yacht which I chartered last winter.
+She is here.  We'll go off on her together, away from the world, for as
+long as you like.  And then," he ended triumphantly, "then we'll go back
+to Grenoble and begin our life."
+
+"And begin our life!" she repeated.  But it was not to him that she
+spoke.  "Hugh, I positively have to have some clothes."
+
+"Clothes!"  His voice expressed his contempt for the mundane thought.
+
+"Yes, clothes," she repeated resolutely.
+
+He looked at his watch once more.
+
+"Very well," he said, "we'll get 'em on the way."
+
+"On the way?" she asked.
+
+"We'll have to have a marriage license, I'm afraid," he explained
+apologetically.
+
+Honora grew crimson.  A marriage license!
+
+She yielded, of course.  Who could resist him?  Nor need the details of
+that interminable journey down the crowded artery of Broadway to the
+Centre of Things be entered into.  An ignoble errand, Honora thought; and
+she sat very still, with flushed cheeks, in the corner of the carriage.
+Chiltern's finer feelings came to her rescue.  He, too, resented this
+senseless demand of civilization as an indignity to their Olympian loves.
+And he was a man to chafe at all restraints.  But at last the odious
+thing was over, grim and implacable Law satisfied after he had compelled
+them to stand in line for an interminable period before his grill, and
+mingle with those whom he chose, in his ignorance, to call their peers.
+Honora felt degraded as they emerged with the hateful paper, bought at
+such a price.  The City Hall Park, with its moving streams of people,
+etched itself in her memory.
+
+"Leave me, Hugh," she said; "I will take this carriage--you must get
+another one."
+
+For once, he accepted his dismissal with comparative meekness.
+
+"When shall I come?" he asked.
+
+"She smiled a little, in spite of herself.
+
+"You may come for me at six o'clock," she replied.
+
+"Six o'clock!" he exclaimed; but accepted with resignation and closed the
+carriage door.  Enigmatical sex!
+
+Enigmatical sex indeed!  Honora spent a feverish afternoon, rest and
+reflection being things she feared.  An afternoon in familiar places; and
+(strangest of all facts to be recorded!) memories and regrets troubled
+her not at all.  Her old dressmakers, her old milliners, welcomed her
+as one risen, radiant, from the grave; risen, in their estimation, to
+a higher life.  Honora knew this, and was indifferent to the wealth of
+meaning that lay behind their discretion.  Milliners and dressmakers read
+the newspapers and periodicals--certain periodicals.  Well they knew that
+the lady they flattered was the future Mrs. Hugh Chiltern.
+
+Nothing whatever of an indelicate nature happened.  There was no mention
+of where to send the bill, or of whom to send it to.  Such things as she
+bought on the spot were placed in her carriage.  And happiest of all
+omissions, she met no one she knew.  The praise that Madame Barriere
+lavished on Honora's figure was not flattery, because the Paris models
+fitted her to perfection.  A little after five she returned to her hotel,
+to a Mathilde in a high state of suppressed excitement.  And at six, the
+appointed fateful hour, arrayed in a new street gown of dark green cloth,
+she stood awaiting him.
+
+He was no laggard.  The bell on the church near by was still singing from
+the last stroke when he knocked, flung open the door, and stood for a
+moment staring at her.  Not that she had been shabby when he had wished
+to marry her at noon: no self-respecting woman is ever shabby; not that
+her present costume had any of the elements of overdress; far from it.
+Being a woman, she had her thrill of triumph at his exclamation.  Diana
+had no need, perhaps, of a French dressmaker, but it is an open question
+whether she would have scorned them.  Honora stood motionless, but her
+smile for him was like the first quivering shaft of day.  He opened a
+box, and with a strange mixture of impetuosity and reverence came
+forward.  And she saw that he held in his hand a string of great,
+glistening pearls.
+
+"They were my mother's," he said.  "I have had them restrung--for you."
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried.  She could find no words to express the tremor
+within.  And she stood passively, her eyes half closed, while he clasped
+the string around the lace collar that pressed the slender column of her
+neck and kissed her.
+
+Even the humble beings who work in hotels are responsive to unusual
+disturbances in the ether.  At the Barnstable, a gala note prevailed:
+bell boys, porters, clerk, and cashier, proud of their sudden wisdom,
+were wreathed in smiles.  A new automobile, in Chiltern's colours, with
+his crest on the panel, was panting beside the curb.
+
+"I meant to have had it this morning," he apologized as he handed her in,
+"but it wasn't ready in time."
+
+Honora heard him, and said something in reply.  She tried in vain to
+rouse herself from the lethargy into which she had fallen, to cast off
+the spell.  Up Fifth Avenue they sped, past meaningless houses, to the
+Park.  The crystal air of evening was suffused with the level evening
+light; and as they wound in and out under the spreading trees she caught
+glimpses across the shrubbery of the deepening blue of waters.  Pools of
+mystery were her eyes.
+
+The upper West Side is a definite place on the map, and full,
+undoubtedly, of palpitating human joys and sorrows.  So far as Honora was
+concerned, it might have been Bagdad.  The automobile had stopped before
+a residence, and she found herself mounting the steps at Chiltern's side.
+A Swedish maid opened the door.
+
+"Is Mr. White at home?" Chiltern asked.
+
+It seemed that "the Reverend Mr. White" was.  He appeared, a portly
+gentleman with frock coat and lawn tie who resembled the man in the moon.
+His head, like polished ivory, increased the beaming effect of his
+welcome, and the hand that pressed Honora's was large and soft and warm.
+But dreams are queer things, in which no events surprise us.
+
+The reverend gentleman, as he greeted Chiltern, pronounced his name with
+unction.  His air of hospitality, of good-fellowship, of taking the world
+as he found it, could not have been improved upon.  He made it apparent
+at once that nothing could surprise him.  It was the most natural
+circumstance in life that two people should arrive at his house in an
+automobile at half-past six in the evening and wish to get married: if
+they chose this method instead of the one involving awnings and policemen
+and uncomfortably-arrayed relations and friends, it was none of Mr.
+White's affair.  He led them into the Gothic sanctum at the rear of the
+house where the famous sermons were written that shook the sounding-board
+of the temple where the gentleman preached,--the sermons that sometimes
+got into the newspapers.  Mr. White cleared his throat.
+
+"I am--very familiar with your name, Mr. Chiltern," he said, "and it is
+a pleasure to be able to serve you, and the lady who is so shortly to be
+your wife.  Your servant arrived with your note at four o'clock.  Ten
+minutes later, and I should have missed him."
+
+And then Honora heard Chiltern saying somewhat coldly:--
+
+"In order to save time, Mr. White, I wish to tell you that Mrs.
+Leffingwell has been divorced--"
+
+The Reverend Mr. White put up a hand before him, and looked down at the
+carpet, as one who would not dwell upon painful things.
+
+"Unfortunate--ahem--mistakes will occur in life, Mr. Chiltern--in the
+best of lives," he replied.  "Say no more about it.  I am sure, looking
+at you both--"
+
+"Very well then," said Chiltern brusquely, "I knew you would have to
+know.  And here," he added, "is an essential paper."
+
+A few minutes later, in continuation of the same strange dream, Honora
+was standing at Chiltern's side and the Reverend Mr. White was addressing
+them: What he said--apart of it at least--seemed curiously familiar.
+Chiltern put a ring on a finger of her ungloved hand.  It was a supreme
+moment in her destiny--this she knew.  Between her responses she repeated
+it to herself, but the mighty fact refused to be registered.  And then,
+suddenly, rang out the words:
+
+     "Those whom God hath joined together let no man Put asunder."
+
+Those whom God hath joined together!  Mr. White was congratulating her.
+Other people were in the room--the minister's son, his wife, his brother-
+in-law.  She was in the street again, in the automobile, without knowing
+how she got there, and Chiltern close beside her in the limousine.
+
+"My wife!" he whispered.
+
+Was she?  Could it be true, be lasting, be binding for ever and ever?
+Her hand pressed his convulsively.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she cried, "care for me--stay by me forever.  Will you
+promise?"
+
+"I promise, Honora," he repeated.  "Henceforth we are one."
+
+Honora would have prolonged forever that honeymoon on summer seas.  In
+those blissful days she was content to sit by the hour watching him as,
+bareheaded in the damp salt breeze, he sailed the great schooner and gave
+sharp orders to the crew.  He was a man who would be obeyed, and even his
+flashes of temper pleased her.  He was her master, too, and she gloried
+in the fact.  By the aid of the precious light within her, she studied
+him.
+
+He loved her mightily, fiercely, but withal tenderly.  With her alone he
+was infinitely tender, and it seemed that something in him cried out for
+battle against the rest of the world.  He had his way, in port and out of
+it.  He brooked no opposition, and delighted to carry, against his
+captain's advice, more canvas than was wise when it blew heavily.  But
+the yacht, like a woman, seemed a creature of his will; to know no fear
+when she felt his guiding hand, even though the green water ran in the
+scuppers.
+
+And every day anew she scanned his face, even as he scanned the face of
+the waters.  What was she searching for?  To have so much is to become
+miserly, to fear lest a grain of the precious store be lost.  On the
+second day they had anchored, for an hour or two, between the sandy
+headlands of a small New England port, and she had stood on the deck
+watching his receding figure under the flag of the gasoline launch as it
+made its way towards the deserted wharves.  Beyond the wharves was an
+elm-arched village street, and above the verdure rose the white cupola of
+the house of some prosperous sea-captain of bygone times.  Honora had not
+wished to go ashore.  First he had begged, and then he had laughed as he
+had leaped into the launch.  She lay in a chaise longue, watching it
+swinging idly at the dock.
+
+The night before he had written letters and telegrams.  Once he had
+looked up at her as she sat with a book in her hand across the saloon,
+and caught her eyes.  She had been pretending not to watch him.
+
+"Wedding announcements," he said.
+
+And she had smiled back at him bravely.  Such was the first
+acknowledgment between them that the world existed.
+
+"A little late," he observed, smiling in his turn as he changed his pen,
+"but they'll have to make allowances for the exigencies of the situation.
+And they've been after me to settle down for so many years that they
+ought to be thankful to get them at all.  I've told them that after a
+decent period they may come to Grenoble--in the late autumn.  We don't
+want anybody before then, do we, Honora?"
+
+"No," she said faintly; and added, "I shall always be satisfied with you
+alone, Hugh."
+
+He laughed happily, and presently she went up on deck and stood with her
+face to the breeze.  There were no sounds save the musical beat of the
+water against the strakes, and the low hum of wind on the towering
+vibrant sails.  One moulten silver star stood out above all others.
+To the northward, somewhere beyond the spot where sea and sky met in the
+hidden kiss of night, was Newport,--were his relations and her friends.
+What did they think?  He, at least, had no anxieties about the world,
+why should she?  Their defiance of it had been no greater than that of
+an hundred others on whom it had smiled benignly.  But had not the others
+truckled more to its conventions?  Little she cared about it, indeed, and
+if he had turned the prow of the 'Adhemar' towards the unpeopled places
+of the earth, her joy would have been untroubled.
+
+One after another the days glided by, while with the sharpened senses
+of a great love she watched for a sign of the thing that slept in him--
+of the thing that had driven him home from his wanderings to re-create
+his life.  When it awoke, she would have to share him; now he was hers
+alone.  Her feelings towards this thing did not assume the proportions of
+jealousy or fear; they were merely alert, vaguely disquieting.  The
+sleeping thing was not a monster.  No, but it might grow into one,
+if its appetite were not satisfied, and blame her.
+
+She told herself that, had he lacked ambition, she could not have
+loved him, and did not stop to reflect upon the completeness of her
+satisfaction with the Viking.  He seemed, indeed, in these weeks, one
+whom the sea has marked for its own, and her delight in watching him as
+he moved about the boat never palled.  His nose reminded her of the prow
+of a ship of war, and his deep-set eyes were continually searching the
+horizon for an enemy.  Such were her fancies.  In the early morning when
+he donned his sleeveless bathing suit, she could never resist the
+temptation to follow him on deck to see him plunge into the cold ocean:
+it gave her a delightful little shiver--and he was made like one of the
+gods of Valhalla.
+
+She had discovered, too, in these intimate days, that he had the
+Northman's temperament; she both loved and dreaded his moods.  And
+sometimes, when the yacht glided over smoother seas, it was his pleasure
+to read to her, even poetry and the great epics.  That he should be fond
+of the cruel Scotch ballads she was not surprised; but his familiarity
+with the book of Job, and his love for it, astonished her.  It was a
+singular library that he had put on board the 'Adhemar'.
+
+One evening when the sails flapped idly and the blocks rattled, when they
+had been watching in silence the flaming orange of the sunset above the
+amethystine Camden hills, he spoke the words for which she had been
+waiting.
+
+"Honora, what do you say to going back to Grenoble?"
+
+She succeeded in smiling at him.
+
+"Whenever you like, Hugh," she said.
+
+So the bowsprit of the 'Adhemar' was turned homewards; and with every
+league of water they left behind them his excitement and impatience
+seemed to grow.
+
+"I can't wait to show it to you, Honora--to see you in it," he exclaimed.
+"I have so long pictured you there, and our life as it will be."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE ENTRANCE INTO EDEN
+
+They had travelled through the night, and in the early morning left the
+express at a junction.  Honora sat in the straight-backed seat of the
+smaller train with parted lips and beating heart, gazing now and again at
+the pearly mists rising from the little river valley they were climbing.
+Chiltern was like a schoolboy.
+
+"We'll soon be there," he cried, but it was nearly nine o'clock when they
+reached the Gothic station that marked the end of the line.  It was a
+Chiltern line, he told her, and she was already within the feudal domain.
+Time indeed that she awoke!  She reached the platform to confront a group
+of upturned, staring faces, and for the moment her courage failed her.
+Somehow, with Chiltern's help, she made her way to a waiting omnibus
+backed up against the boards.  The footman touched his hat, the grey-
+headed coachman saluted, and they got in.  As the horses started off at
+a quick trot, Honora saw that the group on the station platform had with
+one consent swung about to stare after them.
+
+They passed through the main street of the town, lined with plate-glass
+windows and lively signs, and already bustling with the business of the
+day, through humbler thoroughfares, and presently rumbled over a bridge
+that spanned a rushing stream confined between the foundation walls of
+mills.  Hundreds of yards of mills stretched away on either side; mills
+with windows wide open, and within them Honora heard the clicking and
+roaring of machinery, and saw the men and women at their daily tasks.
+Life was a strange thing that they should be doing this while she should
+be going to live in luxury at a great country place.  On one of the walls
+she read the legend Chiltern and Company.
+
+"They still keep our name," said Hugh, "although they are in the trust."
+
+He pointed out to her, with an air of pride, every landmark by the
+roadside.  In future they were to have a new meaning--they were to be
+shared with her.  And he spoke of the times--as child and youth, home
+from the seashore or college, he had driven over the same road.  It wound
+to the left, behind the mills, threaded a village of neat wooden houses
+where the better class of operatives lived, reached the river again, and
+turned at last through a brick gateway, past a lodge in the dense shade
+of sheltering boughs, into a wooded drive that climbed, by gentle
+degrees, a slope.  Human care for generations had given to the place
+a tradition.  People had lived here and loved those trees--his people.
+And could it be that she was to inherit all this, with him?  Was her
+name really Chiltern?
+
+The beating of her heart became a pain when in the distance through the
+spreading branches she caught a glimpse of the long, low outline of the
+house, a vision at once familiar and unreal.  How often in the months
+gone by had she called up the memory of the photograph she had once seen,
+only to doubt the more that she should ever behold that house and these
+trees with him by her side!  They drew up before the door, and a
+venerable, ruddy-faced butler stood gravely on the steps to welcome them.
+Hugh leaped out.  He was still the schoolboy.
+
+"Starling," he said, "this is Mrs. Chiltern."
+
+Honora smiled tremulously.
+
+"How do you do, Starling?"  she said.
+
+"Starling's an old friend, Honora.  He's been here ever since I can
+remember."
+
+The blue eyes of the old servant were fixed on her with a strange,
+searching expression.  Was it compassion she read in them, on this that
+should be the happiest of her days?  In that instant, unaccountably, her
+heart went out to the old man; and something of what he had seen, and
+something of what was even now passing within him, came to her
+intuitively.  It was as though, unexpectedly, she had found a friend
+--and a friend who had had no previous intentions of friendship.
+
+"I'm sure I wish you happiness, madame,--and Mr. Hugh, he said in a voice
+not altogether firm.
+
+"Happiness!" cried Hugh.  "I've never known what it was before now,
+Starling."
+
+The old man's eyes glistened.
+
+"And you've come to stay, sir?"
+
+"All my life, Starling," said Hugh.
+
+They entered the hall.  It was wide and cool, white panelled to the
+ceiling, with a dark oak floor.  At the back of it was an eighteenth-
+century stairway, with a band of red carpet running up the steps, and a
+wrought-iron guard with a velvet-covered rail.  Halfway up, the stairway
+divided at a landing, lighted by great triple windows of small panes.
+
+"You may have breakfast in half an hour, Starling," said Chiltern, and
+led Honora up the stairs into the east wing, where he flung open one of
+the high mahogany doors on the south side.  "These are your rooms,
+Honora.  I have had Keller do them all over for you, and I hope you'll
+like them.  If you don't, we'll change them again."
+
+Her answer was an exclamation of delight.  There was a bedroom in pink,
+with brocaded satin on the walls, and an oriel window thrust out over
+the garden; a panelled boudoir at the corner of the house, with a marble
+mantel before which one of Marie Antoinette's duchesses had warmed her
+feet; and shelves lined with gold-lettered books.  From its windows,
+across the flowering shrubbery and through the trees, she saw the
+gleaming waters of a lake, and the hills beyond.  From this view she
+turned, and caught her breath, and threw her arms about her husband's
+neck.  He was astonished to see that her eyes were filled with tears.
+
+"Oh, Hugh," she cried, "it's too perfect!  It almost makes me afraid."
+
+"We will be very happy, dearest," he said, and as he kissed her he
+laughed at the fates.
+
+"I hope so--I pray so," she said, as she clung to him.  "But--don't
+laugh,--I can't bear it."
+
+He patted her cheek.
+
+"What a strange little girl you are!" he said.  "I suppose I shouldn't be
+mad about you if you weren't that way.  Sometimes I wonder how many women
+I have married."
+
+She smiled at him through her tears.
+
+"Isn't that polygamy, Hugh?" she asked.
+
+It was all like a breathless tale out of one of the wonder books of
+youth.  So, at least, it seemed to Honora as she stood, refreshed with a
+new white linen gown, hesitating on the threshold of her door before
+descending.  Some time the bell must ring, or the cock crow, or the fairy
+beckon with a wand, and she would have to go back.  Back where?  She did
+not know--she could not remember.  Cinderella dreaming by the embers,
+perhaps.
+
+He was awaiting her in the little breakfast room, its glass casements
+open to the garden with the wall and the round stone seat.  The simmering
+urn, the white cloth, the shining silver, the big green melons that the
+hot summer sun had ripened for them alone, and Hugh's eyes as they rested
+on her--such was her illusion.  Nor was it quite dispelled when he
+lighted a pipe and they started to explore their Eden, wandering through
+chambers with, low ceilings in the old part of the house, and larger,
+higher apartments in the portion that was called new.  In the great
+darkened library, side by side against the Spanish leather on the walls,
+hung the portraits of his father and mother in heavy frames of gilt.
+
+Her husband was pleased that she should remain so long before them.  And
+for a while, as she stood lost in contemplation, he did not speak.  Once
+she glanced at him, and then back at the stern face of the General,--
+stern, yet kindly.  The eyes, deep-set under bushy brows, like Hugh's,
+were full of fire; and yet the artist had made them human, too.  A dark,
+reddish brown, close-trimmed mustache and beard hid the mouth and chin.
+Hugh had inherited the nose, but the father's forehead was wider and
+fuller.  Hugh was at once a newer type, and an older.  The face and
+figure of the General were characteristic of the mid-century American of
+the northern states, a mixture of boldness and caution and Puritanism,
+who had won his battles in war and commerce by a certain native quality
+of mind.
+
+"I never appreciated him," said Hugh at length, "until after he died--
+long after.  Until now, in fact.  At times we were good friends, and then
+something he would say or do would infuriate me, and I would purposely
+make him angry.  He had a time and a rule for everything, and I could not
+bear rules.  Breakfast was on the minute, an hour in his study to attend
+to affairs about the place, so many hours in his office at the mills, in
+the president's room at the bank, vestry and charity meetings at regular
+intervals.  No movement in all this country round about was ever set on
+foot without him.  He was one to be finally reckoned with.  And since his
+death, many proofs have come to me of the things he did for people of
+which the world was ignorant.  I have found out at last that his way of
+life was, in the main, the right way.  But I know now, Honora," he added
+soberly, slipping his hand within her arm, "I know now that without you
+I never could do all I intend to do."
+
+"Oh, don't say that!" she cried.  "Don't say that!"
+
+"Why not?" he asked, smiling at her vehemence.  "It is not a confession
+of weakness.  I had the determination, it is true.  I could--I should
+have done something, but my deeds would have lacked the one thing needful
+to lift them above the commonplace--at least for me.  You are the
+inspiration.  With you here beside me, I feel that I can take up this
+work with joy.  Do you understand?"
+
+She pressed his hand with her arm.
+
+"Hugh," she said slowly, "I hope that I shall be a help, and not--not
+a hindrance."
+
+"A hindrance!"  he exclaimed.  "You don't know, you can't realize, what
+you are to me."
+
+She was silent, and when she lifted her eyes it was to rest them on the
+portrait of his mother.  And she seemed to read in the sweet, sad eyes a
+question--a question not to be put into words.  Chiltern, following her
+gaze, did not speak: for a space they looked at the portrait together,
+and in silence .  .  .  .
+
+From one end of the house to the other they went, Hugh reviving at the
+sight of familiar objects a hundred memories of his childhood; and she
+trying to imagine that childhood, so different from her own, passed in
+this wonderful place.  In the glass cases of the gun room, among the
+shining, blue barrels which he had used in all parts of the world, was
+the little shotgun his father had had made for him when he was twelve
+years old.  Hugh locked the door after them when they came out, and
+smiled as he put the key in his pocket.
+
+"My destroying days are over," he declared.
+
+Honora put on a linen hat and they took the gravelled path to the
+stables, where the horses, one by one, were brought out into the
+courtyard for their inspection.  In anticipation of this hour there was
+a blood bay for Honora, which Chiltern had bought in New York.  She gave
+a little cry of delight when she saw the horse shining in the sunlight,
+his nostrils in the air, his brown eyes clear, his tapering neck
+patterned with veins.  And then there was the dairy, with the fawn-
+coloured cows and calves; and the hillside pastures that ran down to the
+river, and the farm lands where the stubbled grain was yellowing.  They
+came back by the path that wound through the trees and shrubbery
+bordering the lake to the walled garden, ablaze in the mellow sunlight
+with reds and purples, salvias and zinnias, dahlias, gladioli, and
+asters.
+
+Here he left her for a while, sitting dreamily on the stone bench.  Mrs.
+Hugh Chiltern, of Grenoble!  Over and over she repeated that name to
+herself, and it refused somehow to merge with her identity.  Yet was she
+mistress of this fair domain; of that house which had sheltered them race
+for a century, and the lines of which her eye caressed with a loving
+reverence; and the Chiltern pearls even then lay hidden around her
+throat.
+
+Her thoughts went back, at this, to the gentle lady to whom they had
+belonged, and whose look began again to haunt her.  Honora's superstition
+startled her.  What did it mean, that look?  She tried to recall where
+she had seen it before, and suddenly remembered that the eyes of the old
+butler had held something not unlike it.  Compassionate--this was the
+only word that would describe it.  No, it had not proclaimed her an
+intruder, though it may have been ready to do so the moment before her
+appearance; for there was a note of surprise in it--surprise and
+compassion.
+
+This was the lady in whose footsteps she was to walk, whose charities and
+household cares she was to assume!  Tradition, order, observance,
+responsibility, authority it was difficult to imagine these as a logical
+part of the natural sequence of her life.  She would begin to-day, if God
+would only grant her these things she had once contemned, and that seemed
+now so precious.  Her life--her real life would begin to-day.  Why not?
+How hard she would strive to be worthy of this incomparable gift!  It was
+hers, hers!  She listened, but the only answer was the humming of the
+bees in the still September morning.
+
+Chiltern's voice aroused her.  He was standing in the breakfast room
+talking to the old butler.
+
+"You're sure there were no other letters, Starling, besides these bills?"
+
+Honora became tense.
+
+"No, sir," she heard the butler say, and she seemed to detect in his
+deferential voice the note of anxiety suppressed in the other's.  "I'm
+most particular about letters, sir, as one who lived so many years with
+your father would be.  All that came were put in your study, Mr. Hugh."
+
+"It doesn't matter," answered Chiltern, carelessly, and stepped out into
+the garden.  He caught sight of her, hesitated the fraction of a moment,
+and as he came forward again the cloud in his eyes vanished.  And yet she
+was aware that he was regarding her curiously.
+
+"What," he said gayly, "still here?"
+
+"It is too beautiful!" she cried.  "I could sit here forever."
+
+She lifted her face trustfully, smilingly, to his, and he stooped down
+and kissed it .  .  .  .
+
+To give the jealous fates not the least chance to take offence, the
+higher life they were to lead began at once.  And yet it seemed at times
+to Honora as though this higher life were the gift the fates would most
+begrudge: a gift reserved for others, the pretensions to which were a
+kind of knavery.  Merriment, forgetfulness, music, the dance; the cup of
+pleasure and the feast of Babylon--these might more readily have been
+vouchsafed; even deemed to have been bargained for.  But to take that
+which supposedly had been renounced--virtue, sobriety, security, respect
+--would this be endured?  She went about it breathlessly, like a thief.
+
+Never was there a more exemplary household.  They rose at half-past
+seven, they breakfasted at a quarter after eight; at nine, young Mr.
+Manning, the farm superintendent, was in waiting, and Hugh spent two or
+more hours in his company, inspecting, correcting, planning; for two
+thousand acres of the original Chiltern estate still remained.  Two
+thousand acres which, since the General's death, had been at sixes and
+sevens.  The General's study, which was Hugh's now, was piled high with
+new and bulky books on cattle and cultivation of the soil.  Government
+and state and private experts came and made tests and went away again;
+new machinery arrived, and Hugh passed hours in the sun, often with
+Honora by his side, installing it.  General Chiltern had been president
+and founder of the Grenoble National Bank, and Hugh took up his duties as
+a director.
+
+Honora sought, with an energy that had in it an element of desperation,
+to keep pace with her husband.  For she was determined that he should
+have no interests in which she did not share.  In those first days it was
+her dread that he might grow away from her, and instinct told her that
+now or never must the effort be made.  She, too, studied farming; not
+from books, but from him.  In their afternoon ride along the shady river
+road, which was the event of her day, she encouraged him to talk of his
+plans and problems, that he might thus early form the habit of bringing
+them to her.  And the unsuspecting male in him responded, innocent of the
+simple subterfuge.  After an exhaustive discourse on the elements lacking
+in the valley soil, to which she had listened in silent intensity, he
+would exclaim:
+
+"By George, Honora, you're a continual surprise to me.  I had no idea a
+woman would take an interest in these things, or grasp them the way you
+do."
+
+Lordly commendations these, and she would receive them with a flush of
+gratitude.
+
+Nor was it ever too hot, or she too busy with household cares, for her to
+follow him to the scene of his operations, whatever these might be: she
+would gladly stand for an hour listening to a consultation with the
+veterinary about an ailing cow.  Her fear was lest some matter of like
+importance should escape her.  She had private conversations with Mr.
+Manning, that she might surprise her husband by an unsuspected knowledge.
+Such were her ruses.
+
+The housekeeper who had come up from New York was the subject of a
+conjugal conversation.
+
+"I am going to send her away, Hugh," Honora announced.  "I don't believe-
+--your mother had one."
+
+The housekeeper's departure was the beginning of Honora's real intimacy
+with Starling.  Complicity, perhaps, would be a better word for the
+commencement of this relationship.  First of all, there was an inspection
+of the family treasures: the table-linen, the silver, and the china--
+Sevres, Royal Worcester, and Minton, and the priceless dinner-set, of
+Lowestoft which had be longed to Alexander Chiltern, reserved, for great
+occasions only: occasions that Starling knew by heart; their dates, and
+the guests the Lowestoft had honoured.  His air was ceremonial as he
+laid, reverently, the sample pieces on the table before her, but it
+seemed to Honora that he spoke as one who recalls departed glories, who
+held a conviction that the Lowestoft would never be used again.
+
+Although by unalterable custom he submitted, at breakfast, the menus of
+the day to Hugh, the old butler came afterwards to Honora's boudoir
+during her struggle with the account books.  Sometimes she would look up
+and surprise his eyes fixed upon her, and one day she found at her elbow
+a long list made out in a painstaking hand.
+
+"What's this, Starling?" she asked.
+
+"If you please, madame," he answered, "they're the current prices in the
+markets--here."
+
+She thanked him.  Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon
+the locality lost upon her.  That he realized the magnitude--for her--
+of the task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with
+the spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had said
+so.  He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once
+recognizing her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that
+ignorance was a shameful thing not to be spoken of.  Speculations upon
+him were irresistible.  She was continually forgetting the nature of his
+situation, and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble of
+the past.  She knew his principles as well as though he had spoken them--
+which he never did.  For him, the world had become awry; he abhorred
+divorce, and that this modern abomination had touched the house of
+Chiltern was a calamity that had shaken the very foundations of his soul.
+In spite of this, he had remained.  Why?  Perhaps from habit, perhaps
+from love of the family and Hugh,--perhaps to see!
+
+And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,--of that she was
+sure,--and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved.  He was
+as one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of
+which he never for an instant doubted.  And he gave Honora the impression
+that he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and
+revealed the end.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES
+
+Honora paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white
+skirt that her maid presented.
+
+"I think I'll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde," she said.
+
+The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun
+with the opening of her eyes that morning.  It was Sunday, and the time
+was at hand when she must face the world.  Might it not be delayed a
+little while--a week longer?  For the remembrance of the staring eyes
+which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled
+her.  It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold
+such terrors for her: to-day she had a longing for it that she had never
+felt in her life before.
+
+Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with
+him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious
+when she appeared, smilingly, at the door.
+
+"Why, you're all dressed up," he said.
+
+"It's Sunday, Hugh."
+
+"So it is," he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness--she
+could not tell.
+
+"I'm going to church," she said bravely.
+
+"I can't say much for old Stopford," declared her husband.  "His sermons
+used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them."
+
+She poured out his coffee.
+
+"I suppose one has to take one's clergyman as one does the weather," she
+said.  "We go to church for something else besides the sermon--don't we?"
+
+"I suppose so, if we go at all," he replied.  "Old Stopford imposes a
+pretty heavy penalty."
+
+"Too heavy for you?" she asked, and smiled at him as she handed him the
+cup.
+
+"Too heavy for me," he said, returning her smile.  "To tell you the
+truth, Honora, I had an overdose of church in my youth, here and at
+school, and I've been trying to even up ever since."
+
+"You'd like me to go, wouldn't you, Hugh?" she ventured, after a silence.
+
+"Indeed I should," he answered, and again she wondered to what extent his
+cordiality was studied, or whether it were studied at all.  "I'm very
+fond of that church, in spite of the fact that--that I may be said to
+dissemble my fondness."  She laughed with him, and he became serious.
+"I still contribute--the family's share toward its support.  My father
+was very proud of it, but it is really my mother's church.  It was due
+to her that it was built."
+
+Thus was comedy played--and Honora by no the means sure that it was a
+comedy.  Even her alert instinct had not been able to detect the acting,
+and the intervening hours were spent in speculating whether her fears had
+not been overdone.  Nevertheless, under the eyes of Starling, at twenty
+minutes to eleven she stepped into the victoria with an outward courage,
+and drove down the shady avenue towards the gates.  Sweet-toned bells
+were ringing as she reached the residence portion of the town, and
+subdued pedestrians in groups and couples made their way along the
+sidewalks.  They stared at her; and she in turn, with heightened colour,
+stared at her coachman's back.  After all, this first Sunday would be the
+most difficult.
+
+The carriage turned into a street arched by old elms, and flanked by
+the houses of the most prosperous townspeople.  Some of these were of
+the old-fashioned, classic type, and others new examples of a national
+architecture seeking to find itself,--white and yellow colonial,
+roughcast modifications of the Shakespearian period, and nondescript
+mixtures of cobblestones and shingles.  Each was surrounded by trim lawns
+and shrubbery.  The church itself was set back from the street.  It was
+of bluish stone, and half covered with Virginia creeper.
+
+At this point, had the opportunity for a secret retreat presented itself,
+Honora would have embraced it, for until now she had not realized the
+full extent of the ordeal.  Had her arrival been heralded by sounding
+trumpets, the sensation it caused could not have been greater.  In her
+Eden, the world had been forgotten; the hum of gossip beyond the gates
+had not reached her.  But now, as the horses approached the curb, their
+restive feet clattering on the hard pavement, in the darkened interior
+of the church she saw faces turned, and entering worshippers pausing in
+the doorway.  Something of what the event meant for Grenoble dawned upon
+her: something, not all; but all that she could bear.
+
+If it be true that there is no courage equal to that which a great love
+begets in a woman, Honora's at that moment was sublime.  Her cheeks
+tingled, and her knees weakened under her as she ran the gantlet to the
+church door, where she was met by a gentleman on whose face she read
+astonishment unalloyed: amazement, perhaps, is not too strong a word for
+the sensation it conveyed to her, and it occurred to her afterwards that
+there was an element in it of outrage.  It was a countenance peculiarly
+adapted to such an expression--yellow, smooth-shaven, heavy-jowled, with
+one drooping eye; and she needed not to be told that she had encountered,
+at the outset, the very pillar of pillars.  The frock coat, the heavy
+watch chain, the square-toed boots, all combined to make a Presence.
+
+An instinctive sense of drama amongst the onlookers seemed to create a
+hush, as though these had been the unwilling witnesses to an approaching
+collision and were awaiting the crash.  The gentleman stood planted in
+the inner doorway, his drooping eye fixed on hers.
+
+"I am Mrs. Chiltern," she faltered.
+
+He hesitated the fraction of an instant, but he somehow managed to make
+it plain that the information was superfluous.  He turned without a word
+and marched majestically up the aisle before her to the fourth pew from
+the front on the right.  There he faced about and laid a protesting hand
+on the carved walnut, as though absolving himself in the sight of his God
+and his fellow-citizens.  Honora fell on her knees.
+
+She strove to calm herself by prayer: but the glances of a congregation
+focussed between her shoulder-blades seemed to burn her back, and the
+thought of the concentration of so many minds upon her distracted her
+own.  She could think of no definite prayer.  Was this God's tabernacle?
+or the market-place, and she at the tail of a cart?  And was she not Hugh
+Chiltern's wife, entitled to his seat in the place of worship of his
+fathers?  She rose from her knees, and her eyes fell on the softly
+glowing colours of a stained-glass window: In memoriam--Alicia Reyburn
+Chiltern.  Hugh's mother, the lady in whose seat she sat.
+
+The organist, a sprightly young man, came in and began turning over his
+music, and the choir took their-places, in the old-fashioned' manner.
+Then came the clergyman.  His beard was white, his face long and narrow
+and shrivelled, his forehead protruding, his eyes of the cold blue of a
+winter's sky.  The service began, and Honora repeated the familiar
+prayers which she had learned by heart in childhood--until her attention
+was arrested by the words she spoke: "We have offended against Thy holy
+laws."  Had she?  Would not God bless her marriage?  It was not until
+then that she began to pray with an intensity that blotted out the world
+that He would not punish her if she had done wrong in His sight.  Surely,
+if she lived henceforth in fear of Him, He would let her keep this
+priceless love which had come to her!  And it was impossible that He
+should regard it as an inordinate and sinful affection--since it had
+filled her life with light.  As the wife of Hugh Chiltern she sought a
+blessing.  Would God withhold it?  He would not, she was sure, if they
+lived a sober and a righteous life.  He would take that into account,
+for He was just.
+
+Then she grew calmer, and it was not until after the doctrinal sermon
+which Hugh had predicted that her heart began to beat painfully once
+more, when the gentleman who had conducted her to her seat passed her
+the plate.  He inspired her with an instinctive fear; and she tried to
+imagine, in contrast, the erect and soldierly figure of General Chiltern
+performing the same office.  Would he have looked on her more kindly?
+
+When the benediction was pronounced, she made her way out of the church
+with downcast eyes.  The people parted at the door to let her pass, and
+she quickened her step, gained the carriage at last, and drove away--
+seemingly leaving at her back a buzz of comment.  Would she ever have the
+courage to do it again?
+
+The old butler, as he flung open the doors at her approach, seemed to be
+scrutinizing her.
+
+"Where's Mr. Chiltern, Starling?  "she asked.
+
+"He's gone for a ride, madame."
+
+Hugh had gone for a ride!
+
+She did not see him until lunch was announced, when he came to the table
+in his riding clothes.  It may have been that he began to talk a little
+eagerly about the excursion he had made to an outlying farm and the
+conversation he had had with the farmer who leased it.
+
+"His lease is out in April," said Chiltern, "and when I told him I
+thought I'd turn the land into the rest of the estate he tried to bribe
+me into a renewal."
+
+"Bribe you?"
+
+Chiltern laughed.
+
+"Only in joke, of course.  The man's a character, and he's something of a
+politician in these parts.  He intimated that there would be a vacancy in
+this congressional district next year, that Grierson was going to resign,
+and that a man with a long purse who belonged to the soil might have a
+chance.  I suppose he thinks I would buy it."
+
+"And--would you like to go to Congress, Hugh?"
+
+"Well," he said, smiling, "a man never can tell when he may have to eat
+his words.  I don't say I shouldn't--in the distant future.  It would
+have pleased the General.  But if I go," he added with characteristic
+vigour, "it will be in spite of the politicians, not because of them.  If
+I go I shan't go bound, and I'll fight for it.  I should enjoy that."
+
+And she was able to accord him the smile of encouragement he expected.
+
+"I am sure you would," she replied.  "I think you might have waited until
+this afternoon and taken me," she reproached him.  "You know how I enjoy
+going with you to those places."
+
+It was not until later in the meal that he anticipated, in an admirably
+accidental manner, the casual remark she had intended to make about
+church.
+
+"Your predictions were fulfilled," she answered; "the sermon wasn't
+thrilling."
+
+He glanced at her.  And instead of avoiding his eyes, she smiled into
+them.
+
+"Did you see the First Citizen of Grenoble?" he inquired.
+
+"I am sure of it," she laughed, "if he's yellow, with a drooping eye and
+a presence; he was kind enough to conduct me to the pew."
+
+"Yes," he exclaimed, "that's Israel Simpson--you couldn't miss him.
+How I used to hate him when I was a boy!  I haven't quite got over it
+yet.  I used to outdo myself to make things uncomfortable for him when he
+came up here--I think it was because he always seemed to be truckling.
+He was ridiculously servile and polite in those days.  He's changed
+since," added Hugh, dryly.  "He must quite have forgotten by this time
+that the General made him."
+
+"Is--is he so much?" said Honora.
+
+Her husband laughed.
+
+"Is it possible that you have seen him and still ask that?" said he.
+"He is Grenoble.  Once the Chilterns were.  He is the head of the
+honoured firm of Israel Simpson and Sons, the president of the Grenoble
+National Bank, the senior warden of the church, a director in the
+railway.  Twice a year, in the columns of the New York newspapers
+dedicated to the prominent arrivals at the hotels, you may read the
+name of Israel Simpson of Grenoble.  Three times has he been abroad,
+respectably accompanied by Maria, who invariably returns to read a paper
+on the cathedrals and art before the Woman's Club."
+
+Maria is his wife, I suppose."
+
+"Yes.  Didn't you run across Maria?  She's quite as pronounced, in her
+way, as Israel.  A very tower of virtue."
+
+"I didn't meet anybody, Hugh," said Honora.  "I'll--I'll look for her
+next Sunday.  I hurried out.  It was a little embarrassing the first
+time," she added, "your family being so prominent in Grenoble."
+
+Upon this framework, the prominence of his family, she built up during
+the coning week a new structure of hope.  It was strange she had never
+thought before of this quite obvious explanation for the curiosity of
+Grenoble.  Perhaps--perhaps it was not prejudice, after all--or not
+all of it.  The wife of the Chiltern heir would naturally inspire a
+considerable interest in any event, and Mrs. Hugh Chiltern in particular.
+And these people would shortly understand, if they did not now
+understand, that Hugh had come back voluntarily and from a sense of duty
+to assume the burdens and responsibilities that so many of his generation
+and class had shirked.  This would tell in their favour, surely.  At this
+point in her meditations she consulted the mirror, to behold a modest,
+slim-waisted young woman becomingly arrayed in white linen, whose cheeks
+were aglow with health, whose eyes seemingly reflected the fire of a
+distant high vision.  Not a Poppaea, certainly, nor a Delila.  No, it was
+unbelievable that this, the very field itself of their future labours,
+should be denied them.  Her heart, at the mere conjecture, turned to
+stone.
+
+During the cruise of the Adhemar she had often watched, in the gathering
+darkness, those revolving lights on headland or shoal that spread now a
+bright band across the sea, and again left the waters desolate in the
+night.  Thus, ceaselessly revolving from white hope to darker doubt, were
+her thoughts, until sometimes she feared to be alone with them, and
+surprised him by her presence in his busiest moments.  For he was going
+ahead on the path they had marked out with a faith in which she could
+perceive no flaw.  If faint and shadowy forms had already come between
+them, he gave no evidence of having as yet discerned these.  There was
+the absence of news from his family, for instance,--the Graingers, the
+Stranger, the Shorters, and the Pendletons, whom she had never seen;
+he had never spoken to her of this, and he seemed to hold it as of no
+account.  Her instinct whispered that it had left its mark, a hidden
+mark.  And while she knew that consideration for her prompted him to hold
+his peace, she told herself that she would have been happier had he
+spoken of it.
+
+Always she was brought back to Grenoble when she saw him thus, manlike,
+with his gaze steadily fixed on the task.  If New York itself withheld
+recognition, could Grenoble--provincial and conservative Grenoble,
+preserving still the ideas of the last century for which his family had
+so unflinchingly stood--be expected to accord it?  New York!  New York
+was many, many things, she knew.  The great house could have been filled
+from weekend to week-end from New York; but not with Graingers and
+Pendletons and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose
+fortresses the currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with
+those who, while not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not
+with those whose assured future was that for which she might have sold
+her soul itself.  Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men;
+those who lived in the world of fashion but were not squeamish--Mrs.
+Kame, for example; and ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried
+a second throw for happiness,--such votaries of excitement would
+undoubtedly have been more than glad to avail themselves of the secluded
+hospitality of Grenoble for that which they would have been pleased to
+designate as "a lively time."  Honora shuddered at the thought: And, as
+though the shudder had been prophetic, one morning the mail contained a
+letter from Mrs. Kame herself.
+
+Mercifully Hugh had not noticed it.  Honora did not recognize the
+handwriting, but she slipped the envelope into her lap, fearful of what
+it might contain, and, when she gained the privacy of her rooms, read it
+with quickening breath.  Mrs. Kame's touch was light and her imagination
+sympathetic; she was the most adaptable of the feminine portion of her
+nation, and since the demise of her husband she had lived, abroad and at
+home, among men and women of a world that does not dot its i's or cross
+its t's.  Nevertheless, the letter filled Honora with a deep apprehension
+and a deeper resentment.  Plainly and clearly stamped between its
+delicately worded lines was the claim of a comradeship born of Honora's
+recent act.  She tore the paper into strips and threw it into the flames
+and opened the window to the cool air of the autumn morning.  She had a
+feeling of contamination that was intolerable.
+
+Mrs. Kame had proposed herself--again the word "delicately" must be used
+--for one of Honora's first house-parties.  Only an acute perception
+could have read in the lady's praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of that
+part of his career already registered on the social slate.  Mrs. Kame had
+thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these autumn days at
+Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would be a sacrilege.
+Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of their friends, and
+throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long closed to the world.
+And--without the air of having picked the single instance, but of having
+chosen from many--Mrs. Kame added that she had only lately seen Elsie
+Shorter, whose admiration for Honora was greater than ever.  A sentiment,
+Honora reflected a little bitterly, that Mrs. Shorter herself had not
+taken the pains to convey.  Consistency was not Elsie's jewel.
+
+It must perhaps be added for the sake of enlightenment that since going
+to Newport Honora's view of the writer of this letter had changed.  In
+other words, enlarging ideals had dwarfed her somewhat; it was strictly
+true that the lady was a boon companion of everybody.  Her Catholicism
+had two limitations only: that she must be amused, and that she must not
+--in what she deemed the vulgar sense--be shocked.
+
+Honora made several attempts at an answer before she succeeded in saying,
+simply, that Hugh was too absorbed in his work of reconstruction of the
+estate for them to have house-parties this autumn.  And even this was a
+concession hard for her pride to swallow.  She would have preferred not
+to reply at all, and this slightest of references to his work--and hers
+--seemed to degrade it.  Before she folded the sheet she looked again at
+that word "reconstruction" and thought of eliminating it.  It was too
+obviously allied to "redemption"; and she felt that Mrs. Kame could not
+understand redemption, and would ridicule it.  Honora went downstairs and
+dropped her reply guiltily into the mail-bag.  It was for Hugh's sake she
+was sending it, and from his eyes she was hiding it.
+
+And, while we are dealing with letters, one, or part of one, from
+Honora's aunt, may perhaps be inserted here.  It was an answer to one
+that Honora had written a few days after her installation at Grenoble,
+the contents of which need not be gone into: we, who know her, would
+neither laugh nor weep at reading it, and its purport may be more or less
+accurately surmised from her aunt's reply.
+
+     "As I wrote you at the time, my dear,"--so it ran "the shock which
+     your sudden marriage with Mr. Chiltern caused us was great--so great
+     that I cannot express it in words.  I realize that I am growing old,
+     and perhaps the world is changing faster than I imagine.  And I
+     wrote you, too, that I would not be true to myself if I told you
+     that what you have done was right in my eyes.  I have asked myself
+     whether my horror of divorce and remarriage may not in some degree
+     be due to the happiness of my life with your uncle.  I am,
+     undoubtedly, an exceptionally fortunate woman; and as I look
+     backwards I see that the struggles and trials which we have shared
+     together were really blessings.
+
+     "Nevertheless, dear Honora, you are, as your uncle wrote you, our
+     child, and nothing can alter that fact in our hearts.  We can only
+     pray with all our strength that you may find happiness and peace in
+     your new life.  I try to imagine, as I think of you and what has
+     happened to you in the few years since you have left us--how long
+     they seem!--I try to imagine some of the temptations that have
+     assailed you in that world of which I know nothing.  If I cannot, it
+     is because God made us different.  I know what you have suffered,
+     and my heart aches for you.
+
+     "You say that experience has taught you much that you could not
+     have--learned in any other way.  I do not doubt it.  You tell me
+     that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one.  Let me
+     repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon
+     sand, that regrets may not come.  I cannot say more.  I cannot
+     dissemble.  Perhaps I have already said too much.
+
+                                   "Your loving
+
+                                             "AUNT MARY."
+
+
+An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the
+steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake.  Unconsciously she repeated the
+words to herself:
+
+"Builded upon sand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER
+
+Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went.  A bewildering, ever
+changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck
+first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a
+wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the
+faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed.  Thus the slopes
+were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival.  Sometimes Honora,
+watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge,
+and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake
+and the rushing river: and she saw these same mists gather again,
+shivering, at nightfall.  In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent
+save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their
+horses' feet.
+
+So the Indian summer passed--that breathless season when even happiness
+has its premonitions and its pangs.  The umber fields, all ploughed and
+harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening
+spring.  Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded
+the valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made
+pools in the hollows of the stone seat: that flung itself against
+Honora's window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.
+Sometimes she listened to it in the night.
+
+She was watching.  How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her
+senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer.  Now, she felt, was the
+crisis at hand: the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the
+balance.  The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but
+little time for thought, had relaxed.  In these wet days had he begun
+to brood a little?  Did he show signs of a reversion to that other
+personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had
+had?  She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the
+Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having
+looked on a superimposed portrait.  That Chiltern which she called her
+Viking, and which, with a woman's perversity, she had perhaps loved most
+of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by.  The
+life of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open.  Was he
+dead, or sleeping?  And if sleeping, would he awake?  How softly she
+tread!
+
+And in these days, with what exquisite, yet tremulous skill and courage
+did she bring up the subject of that other labour they were to undertake
+together--the life and letters of his father.  In the early dusk, when
+they had returned from their long rides, she contrived to draw Chiltern
+into his study.  The cheerfulness, the hopefulness, the delight with
+which she approached the task, the increasing enthusiasm she displayed
+for the character of the General as she read and sorted the letters and
+documents, and the traits of his she lovingly traced in Hugh, were not
+without their effect.  It was thus she fanned, ceaselessly and with a
+smile, and with an art the rarest women possess, the drooping flame.  And
+the flame responded.
+
+How feverishly she worked, unknown to him, he never guessed; so carefully
+and unobtrusively planted her suggestions that they were born again in
+glory as his inspiration.  The mist had lifted a little, and she beheld
+the next stage beyond.  To reach that stage was to keep him intent on
+this work--and--after that, to publish!  Ah, if he would only have
+patience, or if she could keep him distracted through this winter and
+their night, she might save him.  Love such as hers can even summon
+genius to its aid, and she took fire herself at the thought of a book
+worthy of that love, of a book--though signed by him that would redeem
+them, and bring a scoffing world to its knees in praise.  She spent hours
+in the big library preparing for Chiltern's coming, with volumes in her
+lap and a note-book by her side.
+
+One night, as they sat by the blazing logs in his study, which had been
+the General's, Chiltern arose impulsively, opened the big safe in the
+corner, and took out a leather-bound book and laid it on her lap.  Honora
+stared at it: it was marked: Highlawns, Visitors' Book."
+
+"It's curious I never thought of it before," he said, "but my father, had
+a habit of jotting down notes in it on important occasions.
+It may be of some use to us Honora."
+
+She opened it at random and read: "July 5, 1893, Picnic at Psalter's
+Falls.  Temperature 71 at 9 A.M. Bar. 30.  Weather clear.  Charles left
+for Washington, summons from President, in the midst of it.  Agatha and
+Victor again look at the Farrar property.  Hugh has a ducking.
+P.S.  At dinner night Bessie announces her engagement to Cecil Grainger.
+Present Sarah and George Grenfell, Agatha and Victor Strange, Gerald
+Shorter, Lord Kylie--"
+
+Honora looked up.  Hugh was at her shoulder, with his eyes on the page.
+
+"Psalter's Falls!" he exclaimed.  "How well I remember that day!  I was
+just home from my junior year at Harvard."
+
+"Who was 'Charles'?" inquired Honora.
+
+"Senator Pendleton--Bessie's father.  Just after I jumped into the mill-
+pond the telegram came for him to go to Washington, and I drove him home
+in my wet clothes.  The old man had a terrible tongue, a whip-lash kind
+of humour, and he scored me for being a fool.  But he rather liked me,
+on the whole.  He told me if I'd only straighten out I could be anything,
+in reason."
+
+"What made you jump in the mill-pond?" Honora asked, laughing.
+
+"Bessie Grainger.  She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she
+always kept her head, and I didn't."  He smiled.  "I'm willing to admit
+that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously.  We
+were standing on the bridge--I remember it as though it were yesterday--
+and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand bottom.  She
+took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn't get it if she threw it in.
+That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was a pause in the
+conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil Grainger.  It turned
+out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I rescued.  I could have wrung
+his neck, and I didn't speak to her for a month."
+
+Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident.  With his arm
+over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of guests
+which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns passed
+before her eyes.  Distinguished foreigners, peers of England, churchmen,
+and men renowned in literature: famous American statesmen, scientists,
+and names that represented more than one generation of wealth and
+achievement--all were here.  There were his school and college friends,
+five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls who were
+now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or Newport.
+
+Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe.  To
+her sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant.  There were
+other and blank pages in it for future years; and under different
+circumstances he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the
+great table in the library.
+
+It was not until some weeks later that Honora was seated one afternoon in
+the study waiting for him to come in, and sorting over some of the
+letters that they had not yet examined, when she came across a new lot
+thrust carelessly at the bottom of the older pile.  She undid the
+elastic.  Tucked away in one of the envelopes she was surprised to find a
+letter of recent date--October.  She glanced at it, read involuntarily
+the first lines, and then, with a little cry, turned it over.  It was
+from Cecil Grainger.  She put it back into the envelope whence it came,
+and sat still.
+
+After a while, she could not tell how long, she heard Hugh stamping the
+snow from his feet in the little entry beside the study.  And in a few
+moments he entered, rubbing his hands and holding them out to the blaze.
+
+"Hello, Honora," he said; "are you still at it?  What's the matter--a
+hitch?"
+
+She reached mechanically into the envelope, took out the letter, and
+handed it to him.
+
+"I found it just now, Hugh.  I didn't read much of it--I didn't mean to
+read any.  It's from Mr. Grainger, and you must have overlooked it."
+
+He took it.
+
+"From Cecil?" he said, in an odd voice.  "I wasn't aware that he had sent
+me anything-recently."
+
+As he read, she felt the anger rise within him, she saw it in his eyes
+fixed upon the sheet, and the sense of fear, of irreparable loss, that
+had come over her as she had sat alone awaiting him, deepened.  And yet,
+long expected verdicts are sometimes received in a spirit of
+recklessness: He finished the letter, and flung it in her lap.
+
+"Read it," he said.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she protested tremulously.  "Perhaps--perhaps I'd better
+not."  He laughed, and that frightened her the more.  It was the laugh,
+she was sure, of the other man she had not known.
+
+"I've always suspected that Cecil was a fool--now I'm sure of it.  Read
+it!" he repeated, in a note of command that went oddly with his next
+sentence; "You will find that it is only ridiculous."
+
+This assurance of the comedy it contained, however, did not serve to
+fortify her misgivings.  It was written from a club.
+
+     "DEAR HUGH: Herewith a few letters for the magnum opus which I have
+     extracted from Aunt Agatha, Judge Gaines, and others, and to send
+     you my humble congratulations.  By George, my boy, you have dashed
+     off with a prize, and no mistake.  I've never made any secret, you
+     know, of my admiration for Honora--I hope I may call her so now.
+     And I just thought I'd tell you you could count on me for a friend
+     at court.  Not that I'm any use now, old boy.  I'll have to be frank
+     with you--I always was.  Discreet silence, and all that sort of
+     thing: as much as my head is worth to open my mouth.  But I had an
+     idea it would be an act of friendship to let you know how things
+     stand.  Let time and works speak, and Cecil will give the thing
+     a push at the proper moment.  I understand from one of the
+     intellectual journals I read that you have gone in for simple life
+     and scientific farming.  A deuced canny move.  And for the love of
+     heaven, old man, keep it up for a while, anyhow.  I know it's
+     difficult, but keep it up.  I speak as a friend.
+
+     "They received your letters all right, announcing your marriage.
+     You always enjoyed a row--I wish you could have been on hand to see
+     and hear this one.  It was no place for a man of peace, and I spent
+     two nights at the club.  I've never made any secret, you know, of
+     the fact that I think the Pendleton connection hide-bound.  And you
+     understand Bessie--there's no good of my explaining her.  You'd have
+     thought divorce a brand-new invention of the devil, instead of a
+     comparatively old institution.  And if you don't mind my saying so,
+     my boy, you took this fence a bit on the run, the way you do
+     everything.
+
+     "The fact is, divorce is going out of fashion.  Maybe it's because
+     the Pendleton-Grenfell element have always set their patrician faces
+     against it; maybe its been a bit overdone.  Most people who have
+     tried it have discovered that the fire is no better than the frying-
+     pan--both hot as soon as they warm up.  Of course, old boy, there's
+     nothing personal in this.  Sit tight, and stick to the simple life--
+     that's your game as I see it.  No news--I've never known things to
+     be so quiet.  Jerry won over two thousand night before last--he made
+     it no trumps in his own hand four times running.
+
+                              "Yours,
+
+                                        "CECIL."
+
+
+Honora returned this somewhat unique epistle to her husband, and he
+crushed it.  There was an ill-repressed, terrifying savagery in the act,
+and her heart was torn between fear and pity for this lone message of
+good-will.  Whatever its wording, such it was.  A dark red flush had
+mounted his forehead to the roots of his short curly hair.
+
+"Well?" he said.
+
+She was fighting for her presence of mind.  Flashes of his temper she had
+known, but she had never seen the cruel, fiendish thing--his anger.  Not
+his anger, but the anger of the destroyer that she beheld waking now
+after its long sleep, and taking possession of him, and transforming him
+before her very eyes.  She had been able to cope with the new man, but
+she felt numb and powerless before the resuscitated demon of the old.
+
+"What do you expect me to say, Hugh?" she faltered, with a queer feeling
+that she was not addressing him.
+
+"Anything you like," he replied.
+
+"Defend Cecil."
+
+"Why should I defend him?" she said dully.
+
+"Because you have no pride."
+
+A few seconds elapsed before the full import and brutality of this insult
+reached her intelligence, and she cried out his name in a voice shrill
+with anguish.  But he seemed to delight in the pain he had caused.
+
+"You couldn't be expected, I suppose, to see that this letter is a d--d
+impertinence, filled with an outrageous flippancy, a deliberate affront,
+an implication that our marriage does not exist."
+
+She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later.  That
+which slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense of
+danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted her
+as her husband.  He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would
+overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.
+She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.
+
+"No,--I have no pride, Hugh,--it is gone.  I have thought of you only.
+The fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends,
+and ruin your future has killed my pride.  He--Mr. Grainger meant to be
+kind.  He is always like that--it's his way of saying things.  He wishes
+to show that he is friendly to you--to me--"
+
+"In spite of my relations," cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of the
+room.  "They cease to be my relations from this day.  I disown them.  I
+say it deliberately.  So long as I live, not one of them shall come into
+this house.  All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up
+here and live the life my father did.  Very well, now I've done it.  And
+I wrote to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a
+gentleman and a decent citizen--more than some of them do.  No, I wash my
+hands of them.  If they were to crawl up here from the gate on their
+knees, I'd turn them out."
+
+Although he could not hear her, she continued to plead.
+
+"Hugh, try to think of how--how our marriage must have appeared to them.
+Not that I blame you for being angry.  We only thought of one thing--our
+love--" her voice broke at the word, "and our own happiness.  We did not
+consider others.  It is that which sometimes has made me afraid, that we
+believed ourselves above the law.  And now that we have--begun so well,
+don't spoil it, Hugh!  Give them time, let them see by our works that we
+are in earnest, that we intend to live useful lives.
+
+"I don't mean to beg them," she cried, at sight of his eyes.  "Oh, I
+don't mean that.  I don't mean to entreat them, or even to communicate
+with them.  But they are your flesh and blood--you must remember that.
+Let us prove that we are--not--like the others," she said, lifting her
+head, "and then it cannot matter to us what any one thinks.  We shall
+have justified our act to ourselves."
+
+But he was striding up and down the room again.  It was as she feared--
+her plea--had fallen on unheeding ears.  A sudden convulsive leaping of
+the inner fires sent him to his desk, and he seized some note-paper from
+the rack.  Honora rose to her feet, and took a step towards him.
+
+"Hugh--what are you going to do?"
+
+"Do!" he cried, swinging in his chair and facing her, "I'm going
+to do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the
+circumstances.  I'm going to do what I was a fool not to have done three
+months ago--what I should have done if it hadn't been for you.  If in
+their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget
+what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me.  If
+it's the last act of my life I'm going to tell them so."
+
+She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.
+He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the more
+terrible to her because of the white anger he felt.  And still she stood.
+He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.
+
+"I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town in
+half an hour," he said.
+
+It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room.  A mortal
+sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber and
+flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed: and the
+sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her
+universe.  For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was
+excluded.  Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began to
+practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a
+sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.
+
+Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned against
+her?  On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith,
+discarded and scorned all other help.  And at the first contact with that
+greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that
+strength had broken!
+
+Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had
+held up smiling heads.  It was choked now by brambles that scratched her
+nakedness at every step.  Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter
+it!  "We have the right to happiness," he had said, and she had looked
+into his eyes and believed him.  What was this strange, elusive
+happiness, that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that
+essence pure and unalloyed with baser things?  Ecstasy, perhaps, she had
+found--for was it delirium?  Fear was the boon companion of these; or
+better, the pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.
+
+Then, as though some one had turned on a light--a sickening, yet
+penetrating blue light--she looked at Hugh Chiltern.  She did not wish
+to look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger
+than she.  She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very
+sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on.  And
+scan as she would, no traces of the vaunted illimitable power that is
+called love could she discern.  Love he possessed; that she had not
+doubted, and did not doubt, even now.  But it had been given her to see
+that these springs had existed before love had come, and would flow,
+perchance, after it had departed.  Now she understood his anger; it was
+like the anger of a fiercely rushing river striving to break a dam and
+invade the lands below with devastating floods.  All these months the
+waters had been mounting .  .  .  .
+
+Turning at length from the consideration of this figure, she asked
+herself whether, if with her present knowledge she had her choice to
+make over again, she would have chosen differently.  The answer was a
+startling negative.  She loved him.  Incomprehensible, unreasonable, and
+un reasoning sentiment!  That she had received a wound, she knew; whether
+it were mortal, or whether it would heal and leave a scar, she could not
+say.  One salient, awful fact she began gradually to realize, that if she
+sank back upon the pillows she was lost.  Little it would profit her to
+save her body.  She had no choice between her present precarious foothold
+and the abyss, and wounded as she was she would have to fight.  There was
+no retreat:
+
+She sat up, and presently got to her feet and went to the window and
+stared through the panes until she distinguished the blue whiteness of
+the fallen snow on her little balcony.  The night, despite the clouds,
+had a certain luminous quality.  Then she drew the curtains, searched for
+the switch, and flooded the room with a soft glow--that beautiful room in
+which he had so proudly installed her four months before.  She smoothed
+the bed, and walking to the mirror gazed intently at her face, and then
+she bathed it.  Afterwards she opened her window again, admitting a
+flurry of snow, and stood for some minutes breathing in the sharp air.
+
+Three quarters of an hour later she was dressed and descending the
+stairs, and as she entered the library dinner was announced.  Let us
+spare Honora the account of that repast or rather a recital of the
+conversation that accompanied it.  What she found to say under the eyes
+of the servants is of little value, although the fact itself deserves to
+be commended as a high accomplishment; and while she talked, she studied
+the brooding mystery that he presented, and could make nothing of it.
+His mood was new.  It was not sullenness, nor repressed rage; and his
+answers were brief, but he was not taciturn.  It struck her that in spite
+of a concentration such as she had never in her life bestowed on any
+other subject, her knowledge of him of the Chiltern she had married--
+was still wofully incomplete, and that in proportion to the lack of
+perfection of that knowledge her danger was great.  Perhaps the Chiltern
+she had married was as yet in a formative state.  Be this as it may, what
+she saw depicted on his face to-night corresponded to no former
+experience.
+
+They went back to the library.  Coffee was brought and carried off, and
+Honora was standing before the fire.  Suddenly he rose from his chair,
+crossed the room, and before she could draw away seized and crushed her
+in his arms without a word.  She lay there, inert, bewildered as in the
+grip of an unknown force, until presently she was aware of the beating of
+his heart, and a glimmering of what he felt came to her.  Nor was it an
+understandable thing, except to the woman who loved him.  And yet and yet
+she feared it even in that instant of glory.
+
+When at last she dared to look up, he kissed away the tears from her
+cheeks.
+
+"I love you," he said.  "You must never doubt it--do you understand?"
+
+"Yes, Hugh."
+
+"You must never doubt it," he repeated roughly.
+
+His contrition was a strange thing--if it were contrition.  And love--
+woman's love--is sometimes the counsellor of wisdom.  Her sole reproach
+was to return his kiss.
+
+Presently she chose a book, and he read to her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE PILLARS OF SOCIETY
+
+One morning, as he gathered up his mail, Chiltern left lying on the
+breakfast table a printed circular, an appeal from the trustees of the
+Grenoble Hospital.  As Honora read it she remembered that this
+institution had been the favourite charity of his mother; and that Mrs.
+Chiltern, at her death, had bequeathed an endowment which at the time had
+been ample.  But Grenoble having grown since then, the deficit for this
+year was something under two thousand dollars, and in a lower corner was
+a request that contributions be sent to Mrs. Israel Simpson.
+
+With the circular in her hand, Honora went thoughtfully up the stairs to
+her sitting-room.  The month was February, the day overcast and muggy,
+and she stood for a while apparently watching the holes made in the snow
+by the steady drip from the cap of the garden wall.  What she really saw
+was the face of Mrs. Israel Simpson, a face that had haunted her these
+many months.  For Mrs. Simpson had gradually grown, in Honora's mind, to
+typify the hardness of heart of Grenoble.  With Grenoble obdurate, what
+would become of the larger ambitions of Hugh Chiltern?
+
+Mrs. Simpson was indeed a redoubtable lady, whose virtue shone with a
+particular high brightness on the Sabbath.  Her lamp was brimming with
+oil against the judgment day, and she was as one divinely appointed to
+be the chastener of the unrighteous.  So, at least, Honora beheld her.
+Her attire was rich but not gaudy, and had the air of proclaiming the
+prosperity of Israel Simpson alone as its unimpeachable source: her nose
+was long, her lip slightly marked by a masculine and masterful emblem,
+and her eyes protruded in such a manner as to give the impression of
+watchfulness on all sides.
+
+It was this watchfulness that our heroine grew to regard as a salient
+characteristic.  It never slept--even during Mr. Stopford's sermons.
+She was aware of it when she entered the church, and she was sure that
+it escorted her as far as the carriage on her departure.  It seemed to
+oppress the congregation.  And Honora had an idea that if it could have
+been withdrawn, her cruel proscription would have ended.  For at times
+she thought that she read in the eyes of some of those who made way for
+her, friendliness and even compassion.
+
+It was but natural, perhaps, in the situation in which our heroine found
+herself, that she should have lost her sense of proportion to the extent
+of regarding this lady in the light of a remorseless dragon barring her
+only path to peace.  And those who might have helped her--if any there
+were--feared the dragon as much as she.  Mrs. Simpson undoubtedly would
+not have relished this characterization, and she is not to have the
+opportunity of presenting her side of the case.  We are looking at it
+from Honora's view, and Honora beheld chimeras.  The woman changed, for
+Honora, the very aspect of the house of God; it was she who appeared to
+preside there, or rather to rule by terror.  And Honora, as she glanced
+at her during the lessons, often wondered if she realized the appalling
+extent of her cruelty.  Was this woman, who begged so audibly to be
+delivered from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, in reality a Christian?
+Honora hated her, and yet she prayed that God would soften her heart.
+Was there no way in which she could be propitiated, appeased?  For the
+sake of the thing desired, and which it was given this woman to withhold,
+she was willing to humble herself in the dust.
+
+Honora laid the hospital circular on the desk beside her account book.
+She had an ample allowance from Hugh; but lying in a New York bank was
+what remained of the unexpected legacy she had received from her father,
+and it was from this that she presently drew a cheque for five hundred
+dollars,--a little sacrifice that warmed her blood as she wrote.  Not for
+the unfortunate in the hospital was she making it, but for him: and that
+she could do this from the little store that was her very own gave her a
+thrill of pride.  She would never need it again.  If he deserted her, it
+mattered little what became of her.  If he deserted her!
+
+She sat gazing out of the window over the snow, and a new question
+was in her heart.  Was it as a husband--that he loved her?  Did their
+intercourse have that intangible quality of safety that belonged to
+married life?  And was it not as a mistress rather than a wife that,
+in their isolation, she watched his moods so jealously?  A mistress!  Her
+lips parted, and she repeated the word aloud, for self-torture is human.
+
+Her mind dwelt upon their intercourse.  There were the days they spent
+together, and the evenings, working or reading.  Ah, but had the time
+ever been when, in the depths of her being, she had felt the real
+security of a wife?  When she had not always been dimly conscious of a
+desire to please him, of a struggle to keep him interested and contented?
+And there were the days when he rode alone, the nights when he read
+or wrote alone, when her joy was turned to misery; there were the
+alternating periods of passion and alienation.  Alienation, perhaps, was
+too strong a word.  Nevertheless, at such times, her feeling was one of
+desolation.
+
+His heart, she knew, was bent upon success at Grenoble, and one of the
+books which they had recently read together was a masterly treatise, by
+an Englishman, on the life-work of an American statesman.  The vast width
+of the country, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, was stirred with
+politics: a better era was coming, the pulse of the nation beating with
+renewed life; a stronger generation was arising to take the Republic into
+its own hands.  A campaign was in progress in the State, and twice her
+husband had gone some distance to hear the man who embodied the new
+ideas, and had come back moody and restless, like a warrior condemned to
+step aside.  Suppose his hopes were blighted--what would happen?  Would
+the spirit of reckless adventure seize him again?  Would the wilds call
+him? or the city?  She did not dare to think.
+
+It was not until two mornings later that Hugh tossed her across the
+breakfast table a pink envelope with a wide flap and rough edges.  Its
+sender had taken advantage of the law that permits one-cent stamps for
+local use.
+
+"Who's your friend, Honora?"  he asked.
+
+She tried to look calmly at the envelope that contained her fate.
+
+"It's probably a dressmaker's advertisement," she answered, and went on
+with the pretence of eating her breakfast.
+
+"Or an invitation to dine with Mrs. Simpson," he suggested, laughingly,
+as he rose.  "It's just the stationery she would choose."
+
+Honora dropped her spoon in her egg-cup.  It instantly became evident,
+however, that his remark was casual and not serious, for he gathered up
+his mail and departed.  Her hand trembled a little as she opened the
+letter, and for a moment the large gold monogram of its sender danced
+before her eyes.
+
+     "Dear Madam, Permit me to thank you in the name of the Trustees of
+     the Grenoble Hospital for your generous contribution, and believe
+     me, Sincerely yours,
+
+                                   "MARIA W. SIMPSON."
+
+
+The sheet fluttered to the floor.
+
+When Sunday came, for the first time her courage failed her.  She had
+heard the wind complaining in the night, and the day dawned wild and wet.
+She got so far as to put on a hat and veil and waterproof coat; Starling
+had opened the doors, and through the frame of the doorway, on the wet
+steps, she saw the footman in his long mackintosh, his umbrella raised to
+escort her to the carriage.  Then she halted, irresolute.  The impassive
+old butler stood on the sill, a silent witness, she knew, to the struggle
+going on within her.  It seemed ridiculous indeed to play out the comedy
+with him, who could have recited the lines.  And yet she turned to him.
+
+"Starling, you may send the coachman back to the stable."
+
+"Very good, madam."
+
+As she climbed the stairs she saw him gravely closing the doors.  She
+paused on the landing, her sense of relief overborne by a greater sense
+of defeat.  There was still time!  She heard the wheels of the carriage
+on the  circle--yet she listened to them die away.  Starling softly
+caught the latch, and glanced up.  For an instant their looks crossed,
+and she hurried on with palpitating breast, reached her boudoir, and
+closed the door.  The walls seemed to frown on her, and she remembered
+that the sitting-room in St. Louis had worn that same look when, as a
+child, she had feigned illness in order to miss a day at school.  With a
+leaden heart she gazed out on the waste of melting snow, and then tried
+in vain to read a novel that a review had declared amusing.  But a
+question always came between her and the pages: was this the turning
+point of that silent but terrible struggle, when she must acknowledge to
+herself that the world had been too strong for her?  After a while her
+loneliness became unbearable.  Chiltern was in the library.
+
+"Home from church?" he inquired.
+
+"I didn't go, Hugh."
+
+He looked up in surprise.
+
+"Why, I thought I saw you start," he said.
+
+"It's such a dreary day, Hugh."
+
+"But that has never prevented you before."
+
+"Don't you think I'm entitled to one holiday?" she asked.
+
+But it was by a supreme effort she kept back the tears.  He looked at her
+attentively, and got up suddenly and put his hands upon her shoulders.
+She could not meet his eyes, and trembled under his touch.
+
+"Honora," he said, "why don't you tell me the truth?"
+
+"What do you mean, Hugh?"
+
+"I have been wondering how long you'd stand it.  I mean that these women,
+who call themselves Christians, have been brutal to you.  They haven't so
+much as spoken to you in church, and not one of them has been to this
+house to call.  Isn't that so?"
+
+"Don't let us judge them yet, Hugh," she begged, a little wildly, feeling
+again the gathering of another destroying storm in him that might now
+sweep the last vestige of hope away.  And she seized the arguments as
+they came.  "Some of them may be prejudiced, I know.  But others--others
+I am sure are kind, and they have had no reason to believe I should like
+to know them--to work among them.  I--I could not go to see them first,
+I am glad to wait patiently until some accident brings me near them.
+And remember, Hugh, the atmosphere in which we both lived before we came
+here--an atmosphere they regard as frivolous and pleasure-loving.  People
+who are accustomed to it are not usually supposed to care to make friends
+in a village, or to bother their heads about the improvement of a
+community.  Society is not what it was in your mother's day, who knew
+these people or their mothers, and took an interest in what they were
+doing.  Perhaps they think me--haughty."  She tried to smile.  "I have
+never had an opportunity to show them that I am not."
+
+She paused, breathless, and saw that he was unconvinced.
+
+"Do you believe that, Honora?" he demanded.
+
+"I--I want to believe it.  And I am sure, that if it is not true now, it
+will become so, if we only wait."
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"Never," he said, and dropped his hands and walked over to the fire.
+She stood where he had left her.
+
+"I understand," she heard him say, "I understand that you sent Mrs.
+Simpson five hundred dollars for the hospital.  Simpson told me so
+yesterday, at the bank."
+
+"I had a little money of my own--from my father and I was glad to do it,
+Hugh.  That was your mother's charity."
+
+Her self-control was taxed to the utmost by the fact that he was moved.
+She could not see his face, but his voice betrayed it.
+
+"And Mrs. Simpson?" he asked, after a moment.
+
+"Mrs. Simpson?"
+
+"She thanked you?"
+
+"She acknowledged the cheque, as president.  I was not giving it to her,
+but to the hospital."
+
+"Let me see the letter."
+
+"I--I have destroyed it."
+
+He brought his hands together forcibly, and swung about and faced her.
+
+"Damn them!" he cried, "from this day I forbid you to have anything to
+do with them, do you hear.  I forbid you!  They're a set of confounded,
+self-righteous hypocrites.  Give them time!  In all conscience they have
+had time enough, and opportunity enough to know what our intentions
+are.  How long do they expect us to fawn at their feet for a word of
+recognition?  What have we done that we should be outlawed in this way
+by the very people who may thank my family for their prosperity?  Where
+would Israel Simpson be to-day if my father had not set him up in
+business?  Without knowing anything of our lives they pretend to sit in
+judgment on us.  Why?  Because you have been divorced, and I married you.
+I'll make them pay for this!"
+
+"No!" she begged, taking a step towards him.  "You don't know what you're
+saying, Hugh.  I implore you not to do anything.  Wait a little while!
+Oh, it is worth trying!" So far the effort carried her, and no farther.
+Perhaps, at sight of the relentlessness in his eyes, hope left her, and
+she sank down on a chair and buried her face in her hands, her voice
+broken by sobs.  "It is my fault, and I am justly punished.  I have no
+right to you--I was wicked, I was selfish to marry you.  I have ruined
+your life."
+
+He went to her, and lifted her up, but she was like a child whom
+passionate weeping has carried beyond the reach of words.  He could say
+nothing to console her, plead as he might, assume the blame, and swear
+eternal fealty.  One fearful, supreme fact possessed her, the wreck of
+Chiltern breaking against the rocks, driven there by her .  .  .  .
+
+That she eventually grew calm again deserves to be set down as a tribute
+to the organism of the human body.
+
+That she was able to breathe, to move, to talk, to go through the
+pretence of eating, was to her in the nature of a mild surprise.  Life
+went on, but it seemed to Honora in the hours following this scene that
+it was life only.  Of the ability to feel she was utterly bereft.  Her
+calmness must have been appalling: her own indifference to what might
+happen now,--if she could have realized it,--even more so.  And in
+the afternoon, wandering about the house, she found herself in the
+conservatory.  It had been built on against the library, and sometimes,
+on stormy afternoons, she had tea there with Hugh in the red-cushioned
+chairs beside the trickling fountain, the flowers giving them an illusion
+of summer.
+
+Under ordinary circumstances the sound of wheels on the gravel would have
+aroused her, for Hugh scarcely ever drove.  And it was not until she
+glanced through the open doors into the library that she knew that a
+visitor had come to Highlawns.  He stood beside the rack for the
+magazines and reviews, somewhat nervously fingering a heavy watch charm,
+his large silk hat bottom upward on the chair behind him.  It was Mr.
+Israel Simpson.  She could see him plainly, and she was by no means
+hidden from him by the leaves, and yet she did not move.  He had come to
+see Hugh, she understood; and she was probably going to stay where she
+was and listen.  It seemed of no use repeating to herself that this
+conversation would be of vital importance; for the mechanism that
+formerly had recorded these alarms and spread them, refused to work.
+She saw Chiltern enter, and she read on his face that he meant to
+destroy.  It was no news to her.  She had known it for a long, long time
+--in fact, ever since she had came to Grenoble.  Her curiosity, strangely
+enough--or so it seemed afterwards--was centred on Mr. Simpson, as though
+he were an actor she had been very curious to see.
+
+It was this man, and not her husband, whom she perceived from the first
+was master of the situation.  His geniality was that of the commander of
+an overwhelming besieging force who could afford to be generous.  She
+seemed to discern the cloudy ranks of the legions behind him, and they
+encircled the world.  He was aware of these legions, and their presence
+completely annihilated the ancient habit of subserviency with which in
+former years he had been wont to enter this room and listen to the
+instructions of that formidable old lion, the General: so much was plain
+from the orchestra.  He went forward with a cheerful, if ponderous
+bonhomie.
+
+"Ah, Hugh," said he, "I got your message just in time.  I was on the
+point of going over to see old Murdock.  Seriously ill--you know--last
+time, I'm afraid," and Mr. Simpson shook his head.  He held out his hand.
+Hugh did not appear to notice it.
+
+"Sit down, Mr. Simpson," he said.
+
+Mr. Simpson sat down.  Chiltern took a stand before him.
+
+"You asked me the other day whether I would take a certain amount of the
+stock and bonds of the Grenoble Light and Power Company, in which you are
+interested, and which is, I believe, to supply the town with electric
+light, the present source being inadequate."
+
+"So I did," replied Mr. Simpson, urbanely, "and I believe the investment
+to be a good one.  There is no better power in this part of the country
+than Psalter's Falls."
+
+"I wished to inform you that I do not intend to go into the Light and
+Power Company," said Chiltern.
+
+"I am sorry to hear it," Mr. Simpson declared.  "In my opinion, if you
+searched the state for a more profitable or safer thing, you could not
+find it."
+
+"I have no doubt the investment is all that could be desired, Mr.
+Simpson.  I merely wished you to know, as soon as possible, that I did
+not intend to put my money into it.  There are one or two other little
+matters which you have mentioned during the week.  You pointed out that
+it would be an advantage to Grenoble to revive the county fair, and you
+asked me to subscribe five thousand dollars to the Fair Association."
+
+This time Mr. Simpson remained silent.
+
+"I have come to the conclusion, to-day, not to subscribe a cent.  I also
+intend to notify the church treasurer that I will not any longer rent a
+pew, or take any further interest in the affairs of St. John's church.
+My wife was kind enough, I believe, to send five hundred dollars to the
+Grenoble hospital.  That will be the last subscription from any member of
+my family.  I will resign as a director of the Grenoble Bank to-morrow,
+and my stock will be put on the market.  And finally I wished to tell you
+that henceforth I do not mean to aid in any way any enterprise in
+Grenoble."
+
+During this announcement, which had been made with an ominous calmness,
+Mr. Simpson had gazed steadily at the brass andirons.  He cleared his
+throat.
+
+"My dear Hugh," said he, "what you have said pains me excessively-
+excessively.  I--ahem--fail to grasp it.  As an old friend of your
+family--of your father--I take the liberty of begging you to reconsider
+your words."
+
+Chiltern's eyes blazed.
+
+"Since you have mentioned my father, Mr. Simpson," he exclaimed, "I may
+remind you that his son might reasonably have expected at your hands a
+different treatment than that you have accorded him.  You have asked me
+to reconsider my decision, but I notice that you have failed to inquire
+into my reasons for making it.  I came back here to Grenoble with every
+intention of devoting the best efforts of my life in aiding to build up
+the community, as my father had done.  It was natural, perhaps, that I
+should expect a little tolerance, a little friendliness, a little
+recognition in return.  My wife was prepared to help me.  We did not ask
+much.  But you have treated us like outcasts.  Neither you nor Mrs.
+Simpson, from whom in all conscience I looked for consideration and
+friendship, have as much as spoken to Mrs. Chiltern in church.  You have
+made it clear that, while you are willing to accept our contributions,
+you cared to have nothing to do with us whatever.  If I have overstated
+the case, please correct me."
+
+Mr. Simpson rose protestingly.
+
+"My dear Hugh," he said.  "This is very painful.  I beg that you will
+spare me."
+
+"My name is Chiltern," answered Hugh, shortly.  "Will you kindly explain,
+if you can, why the town of Grenoble has ignored us?"
+
+Israel Simpson hesitated a moment.  He seemed older when he looked at
+Chiltern again, and in his face commiseration and indignation were oddly
+intermingled.  His hand sought his watch chain.
+
+"Yes, I will tell you," he replied slowly, "although in all my life no
+crueller duty has fallen on me.  It is because we in Grenoble are old-
+fashioned in our views of morality, and I thank God we are so.  It is
+because you have married a divorced woman under circumstances that have
+shocked us.  The Church to which I belong, and whose teachings I respect,
+does not recognize such a marriage.  And you have, in my opinion,
+committed an offence against society.  To recognize you by social
+intercourse would be to condone that offence, to open the door to
+practices that would lead, in a short time, to the decay of our people."
+
+Israel Simpson turned, and pointed a shaking forefinger at the portrait
+of General Augus Chiltern.
+
+"And I affirm here, fearlessly before you, that he, your father, would
+have been the last to recognize such a marriage."
+
+Chiltern took a step forward, and his fingers tightened.
+
+"You will oblige me by leaving my father's name out of this discussion,"
+he said.
+
+But Israel Simpson did not recoil.
+
+"If we learn anything by example in this world, Mr. Chiltern," he
+continued, "and it is my notion that we do, I am indebted to your father
+for more than my start in life.  Through many years of intercourse with
+him, and contemplation of his character, I have gained more than riches.
+--You have forced me to say this thing.  I am sorry if I have pained you.
+But I should not be true to the principles to which he himself was
+consistent in life, and which he taught by example so many others, if I
+ventured to hope that social recognition in Grenoble would be accorded
+you, or to aid in any way such recognition.  As long as I live I will
+oppose it.  There are, apparently, larger places in the world and less
+humble people who will be glad to receive you.  I can only hope, as an
+old friend and well-wisher of your family, that you may find happiness."
+
+Israel Simpson fumbled for his hat, picked it up, and left the room.  For
+a moment Chiltern stood like a man turned to stone, and then he pressed
+the button on the wall behind him.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Self-torture is human
+
+
+
+
+
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