One item alone of news from the outer world, vital to her, had drifted to her retreat.  Newspapers filled her with dread, but it was from a newspaper, during the first year of her retirement, that she had learned of the death of Howard Spence.  A complication of maladies was mentioned, but the true underlying cause was implied in the article, and this had shocked but not surprised her.  A ferment was in progress in her own country, the affairs of the Orange Trust Company being investigated, and its president under indictment at the hour of his demise.  Her feelings at the time, and for months after, were complex.  She had been moved to deep pity, for in spite of what he had told her of his business transactions, it was impossible for her to think of him as a criminal.  That he had been the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a question in her mind how clearly he had perceived the immorality of his course, and of theirs.  He had not been given to casuistry, and he had been brought up in a school the motto of which he had once succinctly stated:  the survival of the fittest.  He had not been, alas, one of those to survive.

Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each.  She did not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure.  That she had done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another man, she acknowledged freely.  Wrong as she knew this to have been, severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring herself to an adequate penitence.  She tried to remember him as he had been at Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not as he had afterwards become.  There was no question in her mind, now that it was given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried harder, much harder, to make their marriage a success.  He might, indeed, have done more to protect and cherish her.  It was a man’s part to guard a woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded.  On the other hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape it, that she had had the more light of the two:  and that, though the task were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and infuse him with it.

That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point.  Many of her hours were spent in retrospection.  She was, in a sense, as one dead, yet retaining her faculties; and these became infinitely keen now that she was deprived of the power to use them as guides through life.  She felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old.  And she contemplated the Honora of other days—­of the flesh, as though she were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it had been animated and led to destruction.