s dinned in her ears and set
her blood coursing; and again despair seized her with a dirge. Periods
of semiconsciousness only came to her, and from one of these she was
suddenly startled into wakefulness by her own words. "I have the right
to make of my life what I can." But when she beheld the road of terrors
that stretched between her and the shining places, it seemed as though
she would never have the courage to fare forth along its way. To look
back was to survey a prospect even more dreadful.

The incidents of her life ranged by in procession. Not in natural
sequence, but a group here and a group there. And it was given her, for
the first time, to see many things clearly. But now she loved. God alone
knew what she felt for this man, and when she thought of him the very
perils of her path were dwarfed. On returning home that night she
had given her maid her cloak, and had stood for a long time
immobile,--gazing at her image in the pierglass.

"Madame est belle comme l'Imperatrice d'Autriche!" said the maid at
length.

"Am I really beautiful, Mathilde?"

Mathilde raised her eyes and hands to heaven in a gesture that admitted
no doubt. Mathilde, moreover, could read a certain kind of history if
the print were large enough.

Honora looked in the glass again. Yes, she was beautiful. He had found
her so, he had told her so. And here was the testimony of her own
eyes. The bloom on the nectarines that came every morning from Mr.
Chamberlin's greenhouse could not compare with the colour of her cheeks;
her hair was like the dusk; her eyes like the blue pools among the
rocks, and touched now by the sun; her neck and arms of the whiteness of
sea-foam. It was meet that she should be thus for him and for the love
he brought her.

She turned suddenly to the maid.

"Do you love me, Mathilde?" she asked.

Mathilde was not surprised. She was, on the contrary, profoundly
touched.

"How can madame ask?" she cried impulsively, and seized Honora's hand.
How was it possible to be near madame, and not love her?

"And would you go--anywhere with me?"

The scene came back to her in the night watches. For the little maid had
wept and vowed eternal fidelity.

It was not--until the first faint herald of the morning that Honora
could bring herself to pronounce the fateful thing that stood
between her and happiness, that threatened to mar the perfection of a
heaven-born love--Divorce! And thus, having named it resolutely several