She tried to speak, but she could not.  The hideous imperturbability of the man’s hatred sickened her.  And her husband!  The chips fell in silence until a noise on the road caused them to look up.  Chiltern was coming back.  She glanced again at the farmer, but his face was equally incapable, or equally unwilling, to express regret.  Chiltern rode into the dooryard.  The blood from the scratch on his forehead had crossed his temple and run in a jagged line down his cheek, his very hair (as she had sometimes seen it) was damp with perspiration, blacker, kinkier; his eyes hard, reckless, bloodshot.  So, in the past, must he have emerged from dozens of such wilful, brutal contests with man and beast.  He had beaten the sweat-stained horse (temporarily—­such was the impression Honora received), but she knew that he would like to have killed it for its opposition.

“Give me my hat, will you?” he cried to the farmer.

To her surprise the man obeyed.  Chiltern leaped to the ground.

“What do you want for him?” he demanded.

“I’ll take five hundred dollars.”

“Bring him over in the morning,” said Chiltern, curtly.

They rode homeward in silence.  Honora had not been able to raise her voice against the purchase, and she seemed powerless now to warn her husband of the man’s enmity.  She was thinking, rather, of the horror of the tragedy written on the farmer’s face, to which he had given her the key:  Hugh Chiltern, to whom she had intrusted her life and granted her all, had done this thing, ruthlessly, even as he had satisfied to-day his unbridled cravings in maltreating a horse!  And she thought of that other woman, on whose picture she had refused to look.  What was the essential difference between that woman and herself?  He had wanted them both, he had taken them both for his pleasure, heedless of the pain he might cause to others and to them.  For her, perhaps, the higher organism, had been reserved the higher torture.  She did not know.  The vision of the girl in the outer darkness reserved for castaways was terrible.

Up to this point she had, as it were, been looking into one mirror.  Now another was suddenly raised behind her, and by its aid she beheld not a single, but countless, images of herself endlessly repeated.  How many others besides this girl had there been?  The question gave her the shudder of the contemplation of eternity.  It was not the first time Honora had thought of his past, but until today it had lacked reality; until to-day she had clung to the belief that he had been misunderstood; until to-day she had considered those acts of his of the existence of which she was collectively aware under the generic term of wild oats.  He had had too much money, and none had known how to control him.  Now, through this concrete example of another’s experience, she was given to understand that which she had strangely been unable to learn from her own.  And she had fancied, in her folly, that she could control him!  Unable as yet to grasp the full extent of her calamity, she rode on by his side, until she was aware at last that they had reached the door of the house at Highlawns.