ur mother had one."

The housekeeper's departure was the beginning of Honora's real intimacy
with Starling. Complicity, perhaps, would be a better word for the
commencement of this relationship. First of all, there was an
inspection of the family treasures: the table-linen, the silver, and
the china--Sevres, Royal Worcester, and Minton, and the priceless
dinner-set, of Lowestoft which had belonged to Alexander Chiltern,
reserved, for great occasions only: occasions that Starling knew by
heart; their dates, and the guests the Lowestoft had honoured. His air
was ceremonial as he laid, reverently, the sample pieces on the table
before her, but it seemed to Honora that he spoke as one who recalls
departed glories, who held a conviction that the Lowestoft would never
be used again.

Although by unalterable custom he submitted, at breakfast, the menus
of the day to Hugh, the old butler came afterwards to Honora's boudoir
during her struggle with the account books. Sometimes she would look up
and surprise his eyes fixed upon her, and one day she found at her elbow
a long list made out in a painstaking hand.

"What's this, Starling?" she asked.

"If you please, madame," he answered, "they're the current prices in the
markets--here."

She thanked him. Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon
the locality lost upon her. That he realized the magnitude--for her--of
the task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with
the spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had
said so. He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once
recognizing her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that
ignorance was a shameful thing not to be spoken of. Speculations upon
him were irresistible. She was continually forgetting the nature of his
situation, and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble
of the past. She knew his principles as well as though he had spoken
them--which he never did. For him, the world had become awry; he
abhorred divorce, and that this modern abomination had touched the house
of Chiltern was a calamity that had shaken the very foundations of
his soul. In spite of this, he had remained. Why? Perhaps from habit,
perhaps from love of the family and Hugh,--perhaps to see!

And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,--of that she was
sure,--and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved. He was
as one assisting at a high tragedy not