swered, with a start.

"You missed me? Look at me and tell me the truth."

"The truth!" she faltered, and shuddered. The contrast was too
great--the horror of it too great for her to speak of. The pen of Dante
had not been adequate. "Don't ask me, Hugh," she begged, "I can't talk
about it--I never shall be able to talk about it. If I had not loved
you, I should have died."

How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the
quivering pressure on her hand. Ah, if he had not! If he had failed to
grasp the meaning of her purgatory.

"You are wonderful, Honora," was what he said in a voice broken by
emotion.

She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant
of all her priceless possessions. The carriage stopped, but it was some
moments before they realized it.

"You may come up in a little while," she whispered, "and lunch with
me--if you like."

"If I like!" he repeated.

But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool,
marble-lined area of the hotel. A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and
set the new universe to rocking.

"Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume? We have your telegram."

Mrs. Leffingwell! Who was that person? For an instant she stood blankly
holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:
"Mrs. Leffingwell and maid." A pause. Where was her home? Then she added
the words, "St. Louis."

Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over
the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite. While Mathilde,
in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of
the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts. Her spirits
had unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued
her all these months overtaken her once more. Never, never, she told
herself, would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came
she clung to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he
could not understand it.

"Hugh--you will care for me?" she cried.

He kissed away her tears. He could not follow her; he only knew that
what he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before.
Tender, and again strangely and fiercely tender: an instrument of such
miraculous delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch;
an harmonious and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and
sorrow,--of all the warring elements in the world. What he felt was the
supreme mas