“Why should an affair with him ruin it?” asked Farwell, unexpectedly.  “There was Constance Witherspoon.  I understand that went pretty far.”

“My dear boy,” said Mr. Shorter, “it’s the women.  Bessie Grainger here, for instance—­she’d go right up in the air.  And the women had—­well, a childhood-interest in Constance.  Self-preservation is the first law—­of women.”

“They say Hugh has changed—­that he wants to settle down,” said Farwell.

“If you’d ever gone to church, Reggie,” said Mr. Shorter, “you’d know something about the limitations of the leopard.”

CHAPTER VII

“Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”

That night was Honora’s soul played upon by the unknown musician of the sleepless hours.  Now a mad, ecstatic chorus dinned in her ears and set her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge.  Periods of semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words.  “I have the right to make of my life what I can.”  But when she beheld the road of terrors that stretched between her and the shining places, it seemed as though she would never have the courage to fare forth along its way.  To look back was to survey a prospect even more dreadful.

The incidents of her life ranged by in procession.  Not in natural sequence, but a group here and a group there.  And it was given her, for the first time, to see many things clearly.  But now she loved.  God alone knew what she felt for this man, and when she thought of him the very perils of her path were dwarfed.  On returning home that night she had given her maid her cloak, and had stood for a long time immobile,—­gazing at her image in the pierglass.

“Madame est belle comme l’Imperatrice d’Autriche!” said the maid at length.

“Am I really beautiful, Mathilde?”

Mathilde raised her eyes and hands to heaven in a gesture that admitted no doubt.  Mathilde, moreover, could read a certain kind of history if the print were large enough.

Honora looked in the glass again.  Yes, she was beautiful.  He had found her so, he had told her so.  And here was the testimony of her own eyes.  The bloom on the nectarines that came every morning from Mr. Chamberlin’s greenhouse could not compare with the colour of her cheeks; her hair was like the dusk; her eyes like the blue pools among the rocks, and touched now by the sun; her neck and arms of the whiteness of sea-foam.  It was meet that she should be thus for him and for the love he brought her.

She turned suddenly to the maid.

“Do you love me, Mathilde?” she asked.

Mathilde was not surprised.  She was, on the contrary, profoundly touched.

“How can madame ask?” she cried impulsively, and seized Honora’s hand.  How was it possible to be near madame, and not love her?