Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony of weeping on David’s bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness beside Honora’s.  Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great, self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment.  How often she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called to him, summoning him to another day’s work at the great task they had undertaken for themselves.  She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure.  Then, after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities, he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage.

Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora, shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her housewifely stores were kept.

“I don’t suppose you can understand, dear,” she moaned to Kate.  “But it’s a sort of symbol—­a linen-closet is.  See, I hemmed all these things with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!”

How could any one have imagined that the masculine traits in her were getting the upper hand!  She grew more feminine every hour.  There was an increasing rhythm in her movements—­a certain rich solemnity like that of Niobe or Hermione.  Her red-brown hair tumbled about her face and festooned her statuesque shoulders.  The severity of her usual attire gave place to a negligence which enhanced her picturesqueness, and the heaving of her troubled bosom, the lifting of her wistful eyes gave her a tenderer beauty than she ever had had before.  She was passionate enough now to have suited even that avid man who had proved himself so delinquent.

“If only David could have seen her like this!” mused Kate.  “His ‘Blue-eyed One’ would have seemed tepid in comparison.  To think she submerged her splendor to so little purpose!”

She wondered if Honora knew how right Karl Wander had been in saying that some one had blundered, and if she had gained so much enlightenment that she could see that it was herself who had done so.  She had renounced the mistress qualities which the successful wife requires to supplement her wifely character, and she had learned too late that love must have other elements than the rigidly sensible ones.

Honora was turning to the little girls now with a fierce sense of maternal possession.  She performed personal services for them.  She held them in her arms at twilight and breathed in their personality as if it were the one anaesthetic that could make her oblivious to her pain.

Kate hardly could keep from crying out:—­

“Too late!  Too late!”

There was a bleak, attic-like room at the Caravansary, airy enough, and glimpsing the lake from its eastern window, which Kate took temporarily for her abiding-place.  She had her things moved over there and camped amid the chaos till Honora should be gone.