in any other way.  I do not doubt it.  You tell me that your new life, just begun, will be a dutiful one.  Let me repeat that it is my anxious prayer that you have not builded upon sand, that regrets may not come.  I cannot say more.  I cannot dissemble.  Perhaps I have already said too much.

“Your loving

“AuntMary.”

An autumn wind was blowing, and Honora gazed out of the window at the steel-blue, ruffled waters of the lake.  Unconsciously she repeated the words to herself: 

“Builded upon sand!”

CHAPTER XIV

CONTAINING PHILOSOPHY FROM MR. GRAINGER

Swiftly came the autumn days, and swiftly went.  A bewildering, ever changing, and glorious panorama presented itself, green hillsides struck first with flaming crimsons and yellows, and later mellowing into a wondrous blending of gentler, tenderer hues; lavender, and wine, and the faintest of rose colours where the bare beeches massed.  Thus the slopes were spread as with priceless carpets for a festival.  Sometimes Honora, watching, beheld from her window the russet dawn on the eastern ridge, and the white mists crouching in strange, ghostly shapes abode the lake and the rushing river:  and she saw these same mists gather again, shivering, at nightfall.  In the afternoon they threaded valleys, silent save for the talk between them and the stirring of the leaves under their horses’ feet.

So the Indian summer passed—­that breathless season when even happiness has its premonitions and its pangs.  The umber fields, all ploughed and harrowed, lay patiently awaiting the coming again of the quickening spring.  Then fell the rain, the first, cold winter rain that shrouded the valley and beat down upon the defenceless, dismantled garden and made pools in the hollows of the stone seat:  that flung itself against Honora’s window as though begrudging her the warmth and comfort within.  Sometimes she listened to it in the night.

She was watching.  How intent was that vigil, how alert and sharpened her senses, a woman who has watched alone may answer.  Now, she felt, was the crisis at hand:  the moment when her future, and his was to hang in the balance.  The work on the farms, which had hitherto left Chiltern but little time for thought, had relaxed.  In these wet days had he begun to brood a little?  Did he show signs of a reversion to that other personality, the Chiltern she had not known, yet glimpses of whom she had had?  She recalled the third time she had seen him, the morning at the Lilacs in Newport, that had left upon her the curious sense of having looked on a superimposed portrait.  That Chiltern which she called her Viking, and which, with a woman’s perversity, she had perhaps loved most of all, was but one expression of the other man of days gone by.  The life of that man was a closed book she had never wished to open.  Was he dead, or sleeping?  And if sleeping, would he awake?  How softly she tread!