The winter passed.  The last snow melted on the little grass plot, which changed by patches from brown to emerald green; and the children ran over it again, and tracked it in the soft places, but Honora only smiled.  Warm, still days were interspersed between the windy ones, when the sky was turquoise blue, when the very river banks were steeped in new colours, when the distant, shadowy mountains became real.  Liberty ran riot within her.  If he thought with loathing on his former life, so did she.  Only a year ago she had been penned up in a New York street in that prison-house of her own making, hemmed in by surroundings which she had now learned to detest from her soul.

A few more penalties remained to be paid, and the heaviest of these was her letter to her aunt and uncle.  Even as they had accepted other things in life, so had they accepted the hardest of all to bear—­Honora’s divorce.  A memorable letter her Uncle Tom had written her after Peter’s return to tell them that remonstrances were useless!  She was their daughter in all but name, and they would not forsake her.  When she should have obtained her divorce, she should go back to them.  Their house, which had been her home, should always remain so.  Honora wept and pondered long over that letter.  Should she write and tell them the truth, as she had told Peter?  It was not because she was ashamed of the truth that she had kept it from them throughout the winter:  it was because she wished to spare them as long as possible.  Cruellest circumstance of all, that a love so divine as hers should not be understood by them, and should cause them infinite pain!

The weeks and months slipped by.  Their letters, after that first one, were such as she had always received from them:  accounts of the weather, and of the doings of her friends at home.  But now the time was at hand when she must prepare them for her marriage with Chiltern; for they would expect her in St. Louis, and she could not go there.  And if she wrote them, they might try to stop the marriage, or at least to delay it for some years.

Was it possible that a lingering doubt remained in her mind that to postpone her happiness would perhaps be to lose it?  In her exile she had learned enough to know that a divorced woman is like a rudderless ship at sea, at the mercy of wind and wave and current.  She could not go back to her life in St. Louis:  her situation there would be unbearable:  her friends would not be the same friends.  No, she had crossed her Rubicon and destroyed the bridge deep within her she felt that delay would be fatal, both to her and Chiltern.  Long enough had the banner of their love been trailed in the dust.

Summer came again, with its anniversaries and its dragging, interminable weeks:  demoralizing summer, when Mrs. Mayo quite frankly appeared at her side window in a dressing sacque, and Honora longed to do the same.  But time never stands absolutely still, and the day arrived when Mr. Beckwith called in a carriage.  Honora, with an audibly beating heart, got into it, and they drove down town, past the department store where Mr. Mayo spent his days, and new blocks of banks and business houses that flanked the wide street, where the roaring and clanging of the ubiquitous trolley cars resounded.