“How is my elderly dove-coloured friend this morning?” he asked.  “That dinner with her was one of the great events of my life.  I didn’t suppose such people existed any more.”

“Perhaps you’ll stay to breakfast with her,” suggested Honora, smiling.  “I know she’d like to see you again.”

“No, thanks,” he said, taking her hand, “I’m on my way to the train—­I’d quite forgotten it.  Au revoir!” He reached the end of the porch, turned, and called back, “As a ‘dea ex machina’, she has never been equalled.”

Honora stood for a while looking after him, until she heard a footstep behind her,—­Mrs. Holt’s.

“Who was that, my dear?” she asked, “Howard?”

“Howard has gone, Mrs. Holt,” Honora replied, rousing herself.  “I must make his apologies.  It was Mr. Brent.”

“Mr. Brent!” the good lady repeated, with a slight upward lift of the faint eyebrows.  “Does he often call this early?”

Honora coloured a little, and laughed.

“I asked him to breakfast with you, but he had to catch a train.  He —­wished to be remembered.  He took such a fancy to you.”

“I am afraid,” said Mrs. Holt, “that his fancy is a thing to be avoided.  Are you coming to Silverdale with me, Honora?”

“Yes, Mrs. Holt,” she replied, slipping her arm through that of her friend, “for as long as you will let me stay.”

And she left a note for Howard to that effect.

A MODERN CHRONICLE

By Winston Churchill

BOOK III

Volume 5.

CHAPTER I

ASCENDI

Honora did not go back to Quicksands.  Neither, in this modern chronicle, shall we.

The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines in the retrospect.  And there came a time, after the excitement of furnishing the new house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung for a time in space:  not for a very long time; that month, perhaps, between autumn and winter.

We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or two to sympathize with her in her loneliness—­or rather in the moods it produced.  She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of the Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with an expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four times a day.

Sympathy!  We have seen Honora surrounded by friends—­what has become of them?  Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of the most desirable houses in New York.  What more could be wished for?  To jump at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine with an Ideal.  She had these things, and—­strange as it may seem—­suffered.