Even Hugh Chiltern had left her no illusions.  She thought of him at tunes with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she could not say.  She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense feeling had been burned out of her.  And she found that she could permit her mind to rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a sense of horror; there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from haunting terror, no day that had not added its mite to the gathering evidence of an ultimate retribution.  And it was like a nightmare to summon again this spectacle of the man going to pieces under her eyes.  The whole incident in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect bizarre, incredible, as the follies of a night of madness appear in the saner light of morning.  Her great love had bereft her of her senses, for had the least grain of sanity remained to her she might have known that the thing they attempted was impossible of accomplishment.

Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief.  To employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she of all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and thrown up on an island.  What had she done above the others to deserve preservation?  It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests.  Her escape had indeed been miraculous!

Although they had passed through a ceremony, the conviction had never taken root in her that she had been married to Chiltern.  The tie that had united her to him had not been sacred, though it had been no less binding; more so, in fact.  That tie would have become a shackle.  Her perception of this, after his death, had led her to instruct her attorney to send back to his relatives all but a small income from his estate, enough for her to live on during her lifetime.  There had been some trouble about this matter; Mrs. Grainger, in particular, had surprised her in making objections, and had finally written a letter which Honora received with a feeling akin to gratitude.  Whether her own action had softened this lady’s feelings, she never understood; she had cherished the letter for its unexpectedly charitable expressions.  Chiltern’s family had at last agreed to accept the estate on the condition that the income mentioned should be tripled.  And to this Honora had consented.  Money had less value than ever in her eyes.

She lived here in Paris in what may be called a certain peace, made no demands upon the world, and had no expectations from it.  She was now in half mourning, and intended to remain so.  Her isolation was of her own choice, if a stronger expression be not used.  She was by no means an enforced outcast.  And she was even aware that a certain sympathy for her had grown up amongst her former friends which had spread