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.