After that an illogical series of events and pictures passed before her.  She was in a corner of the carriage, her veil raised, gazing at her husband, who had kissed her passionately.  He was there beside her, looking extremely well in his top hat and frock-coat, with a white flower in his buttonhole.  He was the representative of the future she had deliberately chosen.  And yet, by virtue of the strange ceremony through which they had passed, he seemed to have changed.  In her attempt to seize upon a reality she looked out of the window.  They were just passing the Hanbury mansion in Wayland Square, and her eyes fell upon the playroom windows under the wide cornice; and she wondered whether the doll’s house were still in its place, its mute inhabitants waiting to be called by the names she had given them, and quickened into life once more.

Next she recalled the arrival at the little house that had been her home, summer and winter, for so many years of her life.  A red and white awning, stretching up the length of the walk which once had run beside the tall pear trees, gave it an unrecognizable, gala air.  Long had it stood there, patient, unpretentious, content that the great things should pass it by!  And now, modest still, it had been singled out from amongst its neighbours and honoured.  Was it honoured?  It seemed to Honora, so fanciful this day, that its unwonted air of festival was unnatural.  Why should the hour of departure from such a harbour of peace be celebrated?

She was standing beside her husband in the little parlour, while carriage doors slammed in the dusk outside; while one by one—­a pageant of the past which she was leaving forever the friends of her childhood came and went.  Laughter and tears and kisses!  And then, in no time at all, she found herself changing for the journey in the “little house under the hill.”  There, locked up in the little desk Cousin Eleanor had given her long ago, was the unfinished manuscript of that novel written at fever heat during those summer days in which she had sought to escape from a humdrum existence.  And now—­she had escaped.  Aunt Mary, helpful under the most trying circumstances, was putting her articles in a bag, the initials on which she did not recognize—­H.  L. S.—­Honora Leffingwell Spence; while old Catherine, tearful and inefficient, knelt before her, fumbling at her shoes.  Honora, bending over, took the face of the faithful old servant and kissed it.

“Don’t feel badly, Catherine,” she said; “I’ll be coming back often to see you, and you will be coming to see me.”

“Will ye, darlint?  The blessing of God be on you for those words—­and you to be such a fine lady!  It always was a fine lady ye were, with such a family and such a bringin’ up.  And now ye’ve married a rich man, as is right and proper.  If it’s rich as Croesus he was, he’d be none too good for you.”

“Catherine,” said Aunt Mary, reprovingly, “what ideas you put into the child’s head!”