“Hugh, try to think of how—­how our marriage must have appeared to them.  Not that I blame you for being angry.  We only thought of one thing—­our love—­” her voice broke at the word, “and our own happiness.  We did not consider others.  It is that which sometimes has made me afraid, that we believed ourselves above the law.  And now that we have—­begun so well, don’t spoil it, Hugh!  Give them time, let them see by our works that we are in earnest, that we intend to live useful lives.

“I don’t mean to beg them,” she cried, at sight of his eyes.  “Oh, I don’t mean that.  I don’t mean to entreat them, or even to communicate with them.  But they are your flesh and blood—­you must remember that.  Let us prove that we are—­not—­like the others,” she said, lifting her head, “and then it cannot matter to us what any one thinks.  We shall have justified our act to ourselves.”

But he was striding up and down the room again.  It was as she feared —­her plea—­had fallen on unheeding ears.  A sudden convulsive leaping of the inner fires sent him to his desk, and he seized some note-paper from the rack.  Honora rose to her feet, and took a step towards him.

“Hugh—­what are you going to do?”

“Do!” he cried, swinging in his chair and facing her, “I’m going to do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the circumstances.  I’m going to do what I was a fool not to have done three months ago—­what I should have done if it hadn’t been for you.  If in their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me.  If it’s the last act of my life I’m going to tell them so.”

She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.  He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the more terrible to her because of the white anger he felt.  And still she stood.  He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.

“I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town in half an hour,” he said.

It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room.  A mortal sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber and flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed:  and the sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her universe.  For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was excluded.  Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began to practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.

Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned against her?  On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith, discarded and scorned all other help.  And at the first contact with that greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that strength had broken!