The gift of enlisting sympathy and assistance was peculiarly Honora’s.  And if some one had predicted that morning to Mr. Wentworth that before nightfall he would not only have put a lady in distress on the highroad to obtaining a western divorce (which he had hitherto looked upon as disgraceful), but that likewise he would miss his train for Pride’s Crossing, buy the lady’s tickets, and see her off at the South Station for Chicago, he would have regarded the prophet as a lunatic.  But that is precisely what Mr. Wentworth did.  And when, as her train pulled out, Honora bade him goodby, she felt the tug at her heartstrings which comes at parting with an old friend.

“And anything I can do for you here in the East, while—­while you are out there, be sure to let me know,” he said.

She promised and waved at him from the platform as he stood motionless, staring after her.  Romance had spent a whole day in Boston!  And with Mr. Alden Wentworth, of all people!

Fortunately for the sanity of the human race, the tension of grief is variable.  Honora, closed in her stateroom, eased herself that night by writing a long, if somewhat undecipherable, letter to Chiltern; and was able, the next day, to read the greater portion of a novel.  It was only when she arrived in Chicago, after nightfall, that loneliness again assailed her.  She was within nine hours—­so the timetable said—­of St. Louis!  Of all her trials, the homesickness which she experienced as she drove through the deserted streets of the metropolis of the Middle West was perhaps the worst.  A great city on Sunday night!  What traveller has not felt the depressing effect of it?  And, so far as the incoming traveller is concerned, Chicago does not put her best foot forward.  The way from the station to the Auditorium Hotel was hacked and bruised—­so it seemed—­by the cruel battle of trade.  And she stared, in a kind of fascination that increased the ache in her heart; at the ugliness and cruelty of the twentieth century.

To have imagination is unquestionably to possess a great capacity for suffering, and Honora was paying the penalty for hers.  It ran riot now.  The huge buildings towered like formless monsters against the blackness of the sky under the sickly blue of the electric lights, across the dirty, foot-scarred pavements, strange black human figures seemed to wander aimlessly:  an elevated train thundered overhead.  And presently she found herself the tenant of two rooms in that vast refuge of the homeless, the modern hotel, where she sat until the small hours looking down upon the myriad lights of the shore front, and out beyond them on the black waters of an inland sea.

.......................

From Newport to Salomon City, in a state not far from the Pacific tier, is something of a transition in less than a week, though in modern life we should be surprised at nothing.  Limited trains are wonderful enough; but what shall be said of the modern mind, that travels faster than light? and much too fast for the pages of a chronicle.  Martha Washington and the good ladies of her acquaintance knew nothing about the upper waters of the Missouri, and the words “for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer” were not merely literature to them.