her home, should always remain so. Honora wept
and pondered long over that letter. Should she write and tell them the
truth, as she had told Peter? It was not because she was ashamed of
the truth that she had kept it from them throughout the winter: it
was because she wished to spare them as long as possible. Cruellest
circumstance of all, that a love so divine as hers should not be
understood by them, and should cause them infinite pain!

The weeks and months slipped by. Their letters, after that first one,
were such as she had always received from them: accounts of the weather,
and of the doings of her friends at home. But now the time was at hand
when she must prepare them for her marriage with Chiltern; for they
would expect her in St. Louis, and she could not go there. And if she
wrote them, they might try to stop the marriage, or at least to delay it
for some years.

Was it possible that a lingering doubt remained in her mind that to
postpone her happiness would perhaps be to lose it? In her exile she had
learned enough to know that a divorced woman is like a rudderless ship
at sea, at the mercy of wind and wave and current. She could not go back
to her life in St. Louis: her situation there would be unbearable: her
friends would not be the same friends. No, she had crossed her Rubicon
and destroyed the bridge deep within her she felt that delay would be
fatal, both to her and Chiltern. Long enough had the banner of their
love been trailed in the dust.

Summer came again, with its anniversaries and its dragging, interminable
weeks: demoralizing summer, when Mrs. Mayo quite frankly appeared at her
side window in a dressing sacque, and Honora longed to do the same.
But time never stands absolutely still, and the day arrived when Mr.
Beckwith called in a carriage. Honora, with an audibly beating heart,
got into it, and they drove down town, past the department store where
Mr. Mayo spent his days, and new blocks of banks and business houses
that flanked the wide street, where the roaring and clanging of the
ubiquitous trolley cars resounded.

Honora could not define her sensations--excitement and shame and fear
and hope and joy were so commingled. The colours of the red and yellow
brick had never been so brilliant in the sunshine. They stopped before
the new court-house and climbed the granite steps. In her sensitive
state, Honora thought that some of the people paused to look after
them, and that some were smili