She came down the last flight of steps, slowly,
and stopped in front of him.

"You are wonderful, Honora!" he said, and his voice was not quite under
control. He took her hand, that trembled in his, and he seemed to be
seeking to express something for which he could find no words. Thus may
the King have looked upon Rosamond in her bower; upon a beauty created
for the adornment of courts which he had sequestered for his eyes alone.

Honora, as though merely by the touch of his hand in hers, divined his
thought.

"If you think me so, dear," she whispered happily, "it's all I ask."

And they went in to dinner as to a ceremony. It was indeed a ceremony
filled for her with some occult, sacred, meaning that she could not put
into words. A feast symbolical. Starling was sent to the wine-cellar to
bring back a cobwebbed Madeira near a century old, brought out on rare
occasions in the family. And Hugh, when his glass was filled, looked at
his wife and raised it in silence to his lips.

She never forgot the scene. The red glow of light from the shaded
candles on the table, and the corners of the dining room filled with
gloom. The old butler, like a high priest, standing behind his master's
chair. The long windows, with the curtains drawn in the deep, panelled
arches; the carved white mantelpiece; the glint of silver on' the
sideboard, with its wine-cooler underneath,--these, spoke of generations
of respectability and achievement. Would this absorbed isolation, this
marvellous wild love of theirs, be the end of it all? Honora, as one
detached, as a ghost in the corner, saw herself in the picture with
startling clearness. When she looked up, she met her husband's eyes.
Always she met them, and in them a questioning, almost startled look
that was new. "Is it the earrings?" she asked at last. "I don't know,"
he answered. "I can't tell. They seem to have changed you, but perhaps
they have brought out something in your face and eyes I have never seen
before."

"And--you like it, Hugh?"

"Yes, I like it," he replied, and added enigmatically, "but I don't
understand it."

She was silent, and oddly satisfied, trusting to fate to send more
mysteries.

Two days had not passed when that restlessness for which she watched so
narrowly revived. He wandered aimlessly about the place, and flared up
into such a sudden violent temper at one of the helpers in the fields
that the man ran as for his life, and refused to set foot again on a