the library was a dining room in grey, with dark red hangings; it
overlooked the forgotten garden of the hotel.

One item alone of news from the outer world, vital to her, had drifted
to her retreat. Newspapers filled her with dread, but it was from a
newspaper, during the first year of her retirement, that she had learned
of the death of Howard Spence. A complication of maladies was mentioned,
but the true underlying cause was implied in the article, and this had
shocked but not surprised her. A ferment was in progress in her own
country, the affairs of the Orange Trust Company being investigated, and
its president under indictment at the hour of his demise. Her feelings
at the time, and for months after, were complex. She had been moved
to deep pity, for in spite of what he had told her of his business
transactions, it was impossible for her to think of him as a criminal.
That he had been the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a
question in her mind how clearly he had perceived the immorality of his
course, and of theirs. He had not been given to casuistry, and he had
been brought up in a school the motto of which he had once succinctly
stated: the survival of the fittest. He had not been, alas, one of those
to survive.

Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their
relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did
not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had
done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another
man, she acknowledged freely. Wrong as she knew this to have been,
severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring
herself to an adequate penitence. She tried to remember him as he had
been at Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not
as he had afterwards become. There was no question in her mind, now that
it was given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried
harder, much harder, to make their marriage a success. He might, indeed,
have done more to protect and cherish her. It was a man's part to guard
a woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded. On the
other hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape
it, that she had had the more light of the two: and that, though the
task were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and
infuse him with it.

That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point. M