ding
the white bookshelves that still contained the lady's winter reading
fifty or more yellow-and-green-backed French novels and plays. Honora's
first care, after taking possession, was to order her maid to remove
these from her sight: but it is to be feared that they found their way,
directly, to Mathilde's room. Honora would have liked to fumigate the
house; and yet, at the same time, she thanked her stars for it. Mr.
Beekwith obligingly found her a cook, and on Thursday evening she sat
down to supper in her tiny dining room. She had found a temporary haven,
at last.

Suddenly she remembered that it was an anniversary. One week ago that
day, in the old garden at Beaulieu, had occurred the momentous event
that had changed the current of her life!

CHAPTER IX. WYLIE STREET

There was a little spindle-supported porch before Honora's front door,
and had she chosen she might have followed the example of her neighbours
and sat there in the evenings. She preferred to watch the life about
her from the window-seat in the little parlour. The word exile suggests,
perhaps, to those who have never tried it, empty wastes, isolation,
loneliness. She had been prepared for these things, and Wylie Street was
a shock to her: in sending her there at this crisis in her life fate
had perpetrated nothing less than a huge practical joke. Next door, for
instance, in the twin house to hers, flaunted in the face of liberal
divorce laws, was a young couple with five children. Honora counted
them, from the eldest ones that ran over her little grass plot on their
way to and from the public school, to the youngest that spent much of
his time gazing skyward from a perambulator on the sidewalk. Six days of
the week, about six o'clock in the evening, there was a celebration in
the family. Father came home from work! He was a smooth-faced young man
whom a fortnight in the woods might have helped wonderfully--a clerk in
the big department store.

He radiated happiness. When opposite Honora's front door he would open
his arms--the signal for a race across her lawn. Sometimes it was the
little girl, with pigtails the colour of pulled molasses candy, who
won the prize of the first kiss: again it was her brother, a year her
junior; and when he was raised it was seen that the seat of his trousers
was obviously double. But each of the five received a reward, and the
baby was invariably lifted out of the perambulator. And finally there
was a conjug