And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,—­of that she was sure,—­and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved.  He was as one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of which he never for an instant doubted.  And he gave Honora the impression that he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and revealed the end.

CHAPTER XIII

OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES

Honora paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white skirt that her maid presented.

“I think I’ll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde,” she said.

The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun with the opening of her eyes that morning.  It was Sunday, and the time was at hand when she must face the world.  Might it not be delayed a little while—­a week longer?  For the remembrance of the staring eyes which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled her.  It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold such terrors for her:  to-day she had a longing for it that she had never felt in her life before.

Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious when she appeared, smilingly, at the door.

“Why, you’re all dressed up,” he said.

“It’s Sunday, Hugh.”

“So it is,” he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness—­she could not tell.

“I’m going to church,” she said bravely.

“I can’t say much for old Stopford,” declared her husband.  “His sermons used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them.”

She poured out his coffee.

“I suppose one has to take one’s clergyman as one does the weather,” she said.  “We go to church for something else besides the sermon—­don’t we?”

“I suppose so, if we go at all,” he replied.  “Old Stopford imposes a pretty heavy penalty.”

“Too heavy for you?” she asked, and smiled at him as she handed him the cup.

“Too heavy for me,” he said, returning her smile.  “To tell you the truth, Honora, I had an overdose of church in my youth, here and at school, and I’ve been trying to even up ever since.”

“You’d like me to go, wouldn’t you, Hugh?” she ventured, after a silence.

“Indeed I should,” he answered, and again she wondered to what extent his cordiality was studied, or whether it were studied at all.  “I’m very fond of that church, in spite of the fact that—­that I may be said to dissemble my fondness.”  She laughed with him, and he became serious.  “I still contribute—­the family’s share toward its support.  My father was very proud of it, but it is really my mother’s church.  It was due to her that it was built.”