“Peter,” she exclaimed, “why do you bother with me?  I—­I am what I am.  I can’t help it.  I was made so.  I cannot tell you that I am sorry for what I have done—­for what I am going to do.  I will not lie to you—­and you forced me to speak.  I know that you don’t understand, and that I caused you pain, and that I shall cause—­them pain.  It may be selfishness—­I don’t know.  God alone knows.  Whatever it is, it is stronger than I. It is what I am.  Though I were to be thrown into eternal fire I would not renounce it.”

She looked at him again, and her breath caught.  While she had been speaking, he had changed.  There was a fire in his eyes she had never seen before, in all the years she had known him.

“Honora,” he said quietly, “the man who has done this is a scoundrel.”

She stared at him, doubting her senses, her pupils wide with terror.

“How dare you, Peter!  How dare you!” she cried.

“I dare to speak the truth,” he said, and crossed the room to where his hat was lying and picked it up.  She watched him as in a trance.  Then he came back to her.

“Some day, perhaps, you will forgive me for saying that, Honora.  I hope that day will come, although I shall never regret having said it.  I have caused you pain.  Sometimes, it seems, pain is unavoidable.  I hope you will remember that, with the exception of your aunt and uncle, you have no better friend than I. Nothing can alter that friendship, wherever you go, whatever you do.  Goodby.”

He caught her hand, held it for a moment in his own, and the door had closed before she realized that he had gone.  For a few moments she stood motionless where he had left her, and then she went slowly up the stairs to her own room . . . .

CHAPTER X

THE PRICE OF FREEDOM

Had he, Hugh Chiltern, been anathematized from all the high pulpits of the world, Honora’s belief in him could not have been shaken.  Ivanhoe and the Knights of the Round Table to the contrary, there is no chivalry so exalted as that of a woman who loves, no courage higher, no endurance greater.  Her knowledge is complete; and hers the supreme faith that is unmoved by calumny and unbelief.  She alone knows.  The old Chiltern did not belong to her:  hers was the new man sprung undefiled from the sacred fire of their love; and in that fire she, too, had been born again.  Peter—­even Peter had no power to share such a faith, though what he had said of Chiltern had wounded her—­wounded her because Peter, of all others, should misjudge and condemn him.  Sometimes she drew consolation from the thought that Peter had never seen him.  But she knew he could not understand him, or her, or what they had passed through:  that kind of understanding comes alone through experience.

In the long days that followed she thought much about Peter, and failed to comprehend her feelings towards him.  She told herself that she ought to hate him for what he had so cruelly said, and at times indeed her resentment was akin to hatred:  again, his face rose before her as she had seen it when he had left her, and she was swept by an incomprehensible wave of tenderness and reverence.  And yet—­paradox of paradoxes —­Chiltern possessed her!