“And would you go—­anywhere with me?”

The scene came back to her in the night watches.  For the little maid had wept and vowed eternal fidelity.

It was not—­until the first faint herald of the morning that Honora could bring herself to pronounce the fateful thing that stood between her and happiness, that threatened to mar the perfection of a heaven-born love —­Divorce!  And thus, having named it resolutely several times, the demon of salvation began gradually to assume a kindly aspect that at times became almost benign.  In fact, this one was not a demon at all, but a liberator:  the demon, she perceived, stalked behind him, and his name was Notoriety.  It was he who would flay her for coquetting with the liberator.

What if she were flayed?  Once married to Chiltern, once embarked upon that life of usefulness, once firmly established on ground of her own tilling, and she was immune.  And this led her to a consideration of those she knew who had been flayed.  They were not few, and a surfeit of publicity is a sufficient reason for not enumerating them here.  And during this process of exorcism Notoriety became a bogey, too:  he had been powerless to hurt them.  It must be true what Chiltern had said that the world was changing.  The tragic and the ridiculous here joining hands, she remembered that Reggie Farwell had told her that he had recently made a trip to western New York to inspect a house he had built for a “remarried” couple who were not wholly unknown.  The dove-cote, he had called it.  The man, in his former marriage, had been renowned all up and down tidewater as a rake and a brute, and now it was an exception when he did not have at least one baby on his knee.  And he knew, according to Mr. Farwell, more about infant diet than the whole staff of a maternity hospital.

At length, as she stared into the darkness, dissolution came upon it.  The sills of her windows outlined themselves, and a blurred foliage was sketched into the frame.  With a problem but half solved the day had surprised her.  She marvelled to see that it grew apace, and presently arose to look out upon a stillness like that of eternity:  in the grey light the very leaves seemed to be holding their breath in expectancy of the thing that was to come.  Presently the drooping roses raised their heads, from pearl to silver grew the light, and comparison ended.  The reds were aflame, the greens resplendent, the lawn sewn with the diamonds of the dew.

A little travelling table was beside the window, and Honora took her pen and wrote.

“My dearest, above all created things I love you.  Morning has come, and it seems to me that I have travelled far since last I saw you.  I have come to a new place, which is neither hell nor heaven, and in the mystery of it you—­you alone are real.  It is to your strength that I cling, and I know that you will not fail me.

“Since I saw you, Hugh, I have