It was thus she expressed her opinion of mankind in general, outside of her own family circle.  Once she had passionately desired beauty, the high school and the story of Helen of Troy notwithstanding.  Now she began to look at it askance, as a fatal gift; and to pity, rather than envy, its possessors.

As a by-industry, Mrs. Mayo raised geraniums and carnations in her front cellar, near the furnace, and once in a while Peggy, with the pulled-molasses hair, or chubby Abraham Lincoln, would come puffing up Honora’s stairs under the weight of a flower-pot and deposit it triumphantly on the table at Honora’s bedside.  Abraham Lincoln did not object to being kissed:  he had, at least, grown to accept the process as one of the unaccountable mysteries of life.  But something happened to him one afternoon, on the occasion of his giving proof of an intellect which may eventually bring him, in the footsteps of his great namesake, to the White House.  Entering Honora’s front door, he saw on the hall table a number of letters which the cook (not gifted with his brains) had left there.  He seized them in one fat hand, while with the other he hugged the flower-pot to his breast, mounted the steps, and arrived, breathless but radiant, on the threshold of the beautiful lady’s room, and there calamity overtook him in the shape of one of the thousand articles which are left on the floor purposely to trip up little boys.

Great was the disaster.  Letters, geranium, pieces of flower-pot, a quantity of black earth, and a howling Abraham Lincoln bestrewed the floor.  And similar episodes, in his brief experience with this world, had not brought rewards.  It was from sheer amazement that his tears ceased to flow—­amazement and lack of breath—­for the beautiful lady sprang up and seized him in her arms, and called Mathilde, who eventually brought a white and gold box.  And while Abraham sat consuming its contents in ecstasy he suddenly realized that the beautiful lady had forgotten him.  She had picked up the letters, every one, and stood reading them with parted lips and staring eyes.

It was Mathilde who saved him from a violent illness, closing the box and leading him downstairs, and whispered something incomprehensible in his ear as she pointed him homeward.

“Le vrai medecin—­c’est toi, mon mignon.”

There was a reason why Chiltern’s letters had not arrived, and great were Honora’s self-reproach and penitence.  With a party of Englishmen he had gone up into the interior of a Central American country to visit some famous ruins.  He sent her photographs of them, and of the Englishmen, and of himself.  Yes, he had seen the newspapers.  If she had not seen them, she was not to read them if they came to her.  And if she had, she was to remember that their love was too sacred to be soiled, and too perfect to be troubled.  As for himself, as she knew, he was a changed man, who thought of his former life with loathing.  She had made him clean, and filled him with a new strength.