eek-end from New York; but not with Graingers and Pendletons
and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose fortresses the
currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with those who, while
not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not with those whose
assured future was that for which she might have sold her soul itself.
Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men; those who lived in
the world of fashion but were not squeamish--Mrs. Kame, for example;
and ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried a second throw for
happiness,--such votaries of excitement would undoubtedly have been more
than glad to avail themselves of the secluded hospitality of Grenoble
for that which they would have been pleased to designate as "a lively
time." Honora shuddered at the thought: And, as though the shudder had
been prophetic, one morning the mail contained a letter from Mrs. Kame
herself.

Mercifully Hugh had not noticed it. Honora did not recognize the
handwriting, but she slipped the envelope into her lap, fearful of what
it might contain, and, when she gained the privacy of her rooms, read it
with quickening breath. Mrs. Kame's touch was light and her imagination
sympathetic; she was the most adaptable of the feminine portion of her
nation, and since the demise of her husband she had lived, abroad and at
home, among men and women of a world that does not dot its i's or cross
its t's. Nevertheless, the letter filled Honora with a deep apprehension
and a deeper resentment. Plainly and clearly stamped between its
delicately worded lines was the claim of a comradeship born of Honora's
recent act. She tore the paper into strips and threw it into the flames
and opened the window to the cool air of the autumn morning. She had a
feeling of contamination that was intolerable.

Mrs. Kame had proposed herself--again the word "delicately" must be
used--for one of Honora's first house-parties. Only an acute perception
could have read in the lady's praise of Hugh a masterly avoidance of
that part of his career already registered on the social slate. Mrs.
Kame had thought about them and their wonderful happiness in these
autumn days at Grenoble; to intrude on that happiness yet awhile would
be a sacrilege. Later, perhaps, they would relent and see something of
their friends, and throw open again the gates of a beautiful place long
closed to the world. And--without the air of having picked the single
instance, but