.

"Madame will see monsieur?"

A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model:
"Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his
old coat, I think, as there is in his face." As Honora halted on the
threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass
window, and his back was to her.

She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in
the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity
seized her--as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will
fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she
seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that
he heard. He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he
would, and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by
when, hurt and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment,
the delusion that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith
whole again, so many times had he mended a world all awry.

He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his
shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not
speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased
to tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less
frequent.

"Why did you come? Why did you come?" she cried.

"To see you, Honora."

"But you might have--warned me."

"Yes," he said, "it's true, I might."

She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.

"Why aren't you angry?" she said. "You don't believe in what I have
done--you don't sympathize with it--you don't understand it."

"I have come here to try," he said.

She shook her head.

"You can't--you can't--you never could."

"Perhaps," he answered, "it may not be so difficult as you think."

Grown calmer, she considered this. What did he mean by it? to imply a
knowledge of herself?

"It will be useless," she said inconsequently.

"No," he said, "it will not be useless."

She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts
are not wasted.

"What do you intend to try to do?" she asked.

He smiled a little.

"To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora."

She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her
larger anxieties. Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to
harmonize with his surroundings. At Silverdale, and in the drawing-ro