“What made you jump in the mill-pond?” Honora asked, laughing.

“Bessie Grainger.  She had a devil in her, too, in those days, but she always kept her head, and I didn’t.”  He smiled.  “I’m willing to admit that I was madly in love with her, and she treated me outrageously.  We were standing on the bridge—­I remember it as though it were yesterday —­and the water was about eight feet deep, with a clear sand bottom.  She took off a gold bracelet and bet me I wouldn’t get it if she threw it in.  That night, right in the middle of dinner, when there was a pause in the conversation, she told us she was engaged to Cecil Grainger.  It turned out, by the way, to have been his bracelet I rescued.  I could have wrung his neck, and I didn’t speak to her for a month.”

Honora repressed an impulse to comment on this incident.  With his arm over her shoulder, he turned the pages idly, and the long lists of guests which bore witness to the former life and importance of Highlawns passed before her eyes.  Distinguished foreigners, peers of England, churchmen, and men renowned in literature:  famous American statesmen, scientists, and names that represented more than one generation of wealth and achievement—­all were here.  There were his school and college friends, five and six at a time, and besides them those of young girls who were now women, some of whom Honora had met and known in New York or Newport.

Presently he closed the book abruptly and returned it to the safe.  To her sharpened senses, the very act itself was significant.  There were other and blank pages in it for future years; and under different circumstances he might have laid it in its time-honoured place, on the great table in the library.

It was not until some weeks later that Honora was seated one afternoon in the study waiting for him to come in, and sorting over some of the letters that they had not yet examined, when she came across a new lot thrust carelessly at the bottom of the older pile.  She undid the elastic.  Tucked away in one of the envelopes she was surprised to find a letter of recent date—­October.  She glanced at it, read involuntarily the first lines, and then, with a little cry, turned it over.  It was from Cecil Grainger.  She put it back into the envelope whence it came, and sat still.

After a while, she could not tell how long, she heard Hugh stamping the snow from his feet in the little entry beside the study.  And in a few moments he entered, rubbing his hands and holding them out to the blaze.

“Hello, Honora,” he said; “are you still at it?  What’s the matter—­a hitch?”

She reached mechanically into the envelope, took out the letter, and handed it to him.

“I found it just now, Hugh.  I didn’t read much of it—­I didn’t mean to read any.  It’s from Mr. Grainger, and you must have overlooked it.”

He took it.

“From Cecil?” he said, in an odd voice.  “I wasn’t aware that he had sent me anything-recently.”