“I’ll see you to-morrow, Brent,” he called out as they drove away.  Though always assertive, it seemed to Honora that her husband had an increased air of importance as he turned to her now with his hands in his pockets.  He looked at her for a moment, and laughed again.  He, too, had apparently seen the incident only in a humorous light.  “Well, Honora,” he remarked, “you have a sort of a P. T. Barnum way of doing things once in a while—­haven’t you?  Is the old lady really tucked away for the night, or is she coming down to read us a sermon?  And how the deuce did you happen to pick her up?”

She had come downstairs with confession on her lips, and in the agitation of her mind had scarcely heeded Brent’s words or Mrs. Chandos’.  She had come down prepared for any attitude but the one in which she found him; for anger, reproaches, arraignments.  Nay, she was surprised to find now that she had actually hoped for these.  She deserved to be scolded:  it was her right.  If he had been all of a man, he would have called her to account.  There must be—­there was something lacking in his character.  And it came to her suddenly, with all the shock of a great contrast, with what different eyes she had looked upon him five years before at Silverdale.

He went into the house and started to enter the drawing-room, still in disorder and reeking with smoke.

“No, not in there!” she cried sharply.

He turned to her puzzled.  Her breath was coming and going quickly.  She crossed the hall and turned on the light in the little parlour there, and he followed her.

“Don’t you feel well?” he asked.

“Howard,” she said, “weren’t you worried?”

“Worried?  No, why should I have been?  Lula Chandos and May Barclay had seen you in the automobile in town, and I knew you were high and dry somewhere.”

“High and dry,” she repeated.  What?”

“Nothing.  They said I had run off with Mr. Brent, didn’t they?”

He laughed.

“Yes, there was some joking to that effect.”

“You didn’t take it seriously?

“No—­why should I?”

She was appalled by his lack of knowledge of her.  All these years she had lived with him, and he had not grasped even the elements of her nature.  And this was marriage!  Trixton Brent—­short as their acquaintance had been—­had some conception of her character and possibilities her husband none.  Where was she to begin?  How was she to tell him the episode in the automobile in order that he might perceive something of its sinister significance?

Where was she to go to be saved from herself, if not to him?

“I might have run away with him, if I had loved him,” she said after a pause.  “Would you have cared?”

“You bet your life,” said Howard, and put his arm around her.

She looked up into his face.  So intent had she been on what she had meant to tell him that she did not until now perceive he was preoccupied, and only half listening to what she was saying.