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!