An office boy followed him, deposited several volumes on the taule, and Mr. Wentworth read from them in a voice magnificently judicial.

“There’s not much choice, is there?” she faltered, when he had finished.

He smiled.

“As places of residence—­” he began, in an attempt to relieve the pathos.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” she cried.  “Exile is—­is exile.”  She flushed.  After a few moments of hesitation she named at random a state the laws of which required a six months’ residence.  She contemplated him.  “I hardly dare to ask you to give me the name of some reputable lawyer out there.”

He had looked for an instant into her eyes.  Men of the law are not invulnerable, particularly at Mr. Wentworth’s age, and New England consciences to the contrary notwithstanding.  In spite of himself, her eyes had made him a partisan:  an accomplice, he told himself afterwards.

“Really, Mrs. Spence,” he began, and caught another appealing look.  He remembered the husband now, and a lecture on finance in the Grenfell smoking room which Howard Spence had delivered, and which had grated on Boston sensibility.  “It is only right to tell you that our firm does not—­does not—­take divorce cases—­as a rule.  Not that we are taking this one,” he added hurriedly.  “But as a friend—­”

“Oh, thank you!” said Honora.

“Merely as a friend who would be glad to do you a service,” he continued, “I will, during the day, try to get you the name of—­of as reputable a lawyer as possible in that place.”

And Mr. Wentworth paused, as red as though he had asked her to marry him.

“How good of you!” she cried.  “I shall be at the Touraine until this evening.”

He escorted her through the corridor, bowed her into the elevator, and her spirits had risen perceptibly as she got into her cab and returned to the hotel.  There, she studied railroad folders.  One confidant was enough, and she dared not even ask the head porter the way to a locality where—­it was well known—­divorces were sold across a counter.  And as she worked over the intricacies of this problem the word her husband had applied to her action recurred to her—­precipitate.  No doubt Mr. Wentworth, too, had thought her precipitate.  Nearly every important act of her life had been precipitate.  But she was conscious in this instance of no regret.  Delay, she felt, would have killed her.  Let her exile begin at once.

She had scarcely finished luncheon when Mr. Wentworth was announced.  For reasons best known to himself he had come in person; and he handed her, written on a card, the name of the Honourable David Beckwith.

“I’ll have to confess I don’t know much about him, Mrs. Spence,” he said, “except that he has been in Congress, and is one of the prominent lawyers of that state.”