“What I was going to say was this,” the Honourable Dave continued.  “Mrs. Boutwell—­that is to say Mrs. Waterford—­couldn’t stand this hotel any more than you, and she felt like you do about the colony, so she rented a little house up on Wylie Street and furnished it from the East.  I took the furniture off her hands:  it’s still in the house, by the way, which hasn’t been rented.  For I figured it out that another lady would be coming along with the same notions.  Now you can look at the house any time you like.”

Although she had to overcome the distaste of its antecedents, the house, or rather the furniture, was too much of a find in Salomon City to be resisted.  It had but six rooms, and was of wood, and painted grey, like its twin beside it.  But Mrs. Waterford had removed the stained-glass window-lights in the front door, deftly hidden the highly ornamental steam radiators, and made other eliminations and improvements, including the white bookshelves that still contained the lady’s winter reading fifty or more yellow-and-green-backed French novels and plays.  Honora’s first care, after taking possession, was to order her maid to remove these from her sight:  but it is to be feared that they found their way, directly, to Mathilde’s room.  Honora would have liked to fumigate the house; and yet, at the same time, she thanked her stars for it.  Mr. Beekwith obligingly found her a cook, and on Thursday evening she sat down to supper in her tiny dining room.  She had found a temporary haven, at last.

Suddenly she remembered that it was an anniversary.  One week ago that day, in the old garden at Beaulieu, had occurred the momentous event that had changed the current of her life!

CHAPTER IX

WYLIE STREET

There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora’s front door, and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours and sat there in the evenings.  She preferred to watch the life about her from the window-seat in the little parlour.  The word exile suggests, perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation, loneliness.  She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was a shock to her:  in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate had perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke.  Next door, for instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal divorce laws, was a young couple with five children.  Honora counted them, from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their way to and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of his time gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk.  Six days of the week, about six o’clock in the evening, there was a celebration in the family.  Father came home from work!  He was a smooth-faced young man whom a fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully—­a clerk in the big department store.