“Yes,” she answered.

But Mrs. Mayo did not appear to notice or resent her brevity.

“I took a fancy to you the minute I saw you,” she said.  “I can’t say as much for the other Easterner that was here last year.  But I made up my mind that it must be a mighty mean man who would treat you badly.”

Honora stood as though rooted to the pavement.  She found a reply impossible.

“When I think of my luck,” her neighbour continued, “I’m almost ashamed.  We were married on fifteen dollars a week.  Of course there have been trials, we must always expect that; and we’ve had to work hard, but—­it hasn’t hurt us.”  She paused and looked up at Honora, and added contritely:  “There!  I shouldn’t have said anything.  It’s mean of me to talk of my happiness.  I’ll drop in some afternoon—­if you’ll let me —­when I get through my work,” said the little woman.

“I wish you would,” replied Honora.

She had much to think of on her walk that morning, and new resolutions to make.  Here was happiness growing and thriving, so far as she could see, without any of that rarer nourishment she had once thought so necessary.  And she had come two thousand miles to behold it.

She walked many miles, as a part of the regimen and discipline to which she had set herself.  Her haunting horror in this place, as she thought of the colony of which Mr. Beckwith had spoken and of Mrs. Boutwell’s row of French novels, was degeneration.  She was resolved to return to Chiltern a better and a wiser and a truer woman, unstained by the ordeal.  At the outskirts of the town she halted by the river’s bank, breathing deeply of the pure air of the vast plains that surrounded her.

She was seated that afternoon at her desk in the sitting-room upstairs when she heard the tinkle of the door-bell, and remembered her neighbour’s promise to call.  With something of a pang she pushed back her chair.  Since the episode of the morning, the friendship of the little woman had grown to have a definite value; for it was no small thing, in Honora’s situation, to feel the presence of a warm heart next door.  All day she had been thinking of Mrs. Mayo and her strange happiness, and longing to talk with her again, and dreading it.  And while she was bracing herself for the trial Mathilde entered with a card.

“Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute,” she said.

It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.

Honora took the card.  For a long time she sat staring at it, while
Mathilde waited.  It read: 

Mr. Peter Erwin.

“Madame will see monsieur?”

A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model:  “Wear your old coat.  There is as much of a man in the back of his old coat, I think, as there is in his face.”  As Honora halted on the threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass window, and his back was to her.