any of
her hours were spent in retrospection. She was, in a sense, as one dead,
yet retaining her faculties; and these became infinitely keen now that
she was deprived of the power to use them as guides through life. She
felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old.
And she contemplated the Honora of other days--of the flesh, as though
she were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly
regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it
had been animated and led to destruction.

Even Hugh Chiltern had left her no illusions. She thought of him at
tunes with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she
could not say. She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense
feeling had been burned out of her. And she found that she could permit
her mind to rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a
sense of horror; there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from
haunting terror, no day that had not added its mite to the gathering
evidence of an ultimate retribution. And it was like a nightmare to
summon again this spectacle of the man going to pieces under her
eyes. The whole incident in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect
bizarre, incredible, as the follies of a night of madness appear in the
saner light of morning. Her great love had bereft her of her senses, for
had the least grain of sanity remained to her she might have known that
the thing they attempted was impossible of accomplishment.

Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief. To
employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she
of all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and
thrown up on an island. What had she done above the others to deserve
preservation? It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to
herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the
vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his
telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests. Her escape had
indeed been miraculous!

Although they had passed through a ceremony, the conviction had never
taken root in her that she had been married to Chiltern. The tie that
had united her to him had not been sacred, though it had been no less
binding; more so, in fact. That tie would have become a shackle.
Her perception of this, after his death, had led her to instruct her
attorney to s