On the days when his letters came it was as his emissary that the sun shone to give her light in darkness, and she went about the house with a song on her lips.  They were filled, these letters, with an elixir of which she drank thirstily to behold visions, and the weariness of her exile fell away.  The elixir of High Purpose.  Never was love on such a plane!  He lifting her,—­no marvel in this; and she—­by a magic power of levitation at which she never ceased to wonder—­sustaining him.  By her aid he would make something of himself which would be worthy of her.  At last he had the incentive to enable him to take his place in the world.  He pictured their future life at Grenoble until her heart was strained with yearning for it to begin.  Here would be duty,—­let him who would gainsay it, duty and love combined with a wondrous happiness.  He at a man’s labour, she at a woman’s; labour not for themselves alone, but for others.  A paradise such as never was heard of—­a God-fearing paradise, and the reward of courage.

He told her he could not go to Grenoble now and begin the life without her.  Until that blessed time he would remain a wanderer, avoiding the haunts of men.  First he had cruised in the ’Folly, and then camped and shot in Canada; and again, as winter drew on apace, had chartered another yacht, a larger one, and sailed away for the West Indies, whence the letters came, stamped in strange ports, and sometimes as many as five together.  He, too, was in exile until his regeneration should begin.

Well he might be at such a time.  One bright day in early winter Honora, returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters, found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand.  It matters not whose hand:  Honora never sought to know.  She had long regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and the long nights of tears when entire paragraphs of the loathed stuff she had burned ran ceaselessly in her mind.  Would she had burned it before reading it!  An insensate curiosity had seized her, and she had read and read again until it was beyond the reach of fire.

Save for its effect upon Honora, it is immaterial to this chronicle.  It was merely the heaviest of her heavy payments for liberty.  But what, she asked herself shamefully, would be its effect upon Chiltern?  Her face burned that she should doubt his loyalty and love; and yet—­the question returned.  There had been a sketch of Howard, dwelling upon the prominence into which he had sprung through his connection with Mr. Wing.  There had been a sketch of her; and how she had taken what the writer was pleased to call Society by storm:  it had been intimated, with a cruelty known only to writers of such paragraphs, that ambition to marry a Chiltern had been her motive!  There had been a sketch of Chiltern’s career, in carefully veiled but thoroughly comprehensible language, which might have made a Bluebeard shudder.  This, of course, she bore best of all; or, let it be said rather, that it cost her the least suffering.  Was it not she who had changed and redeemed him?