e betrayed enough interest in me to inquire whether I were married or
single."

Honora laughed. They were seated in the balcony by this time, and he had
the volume of memoirs on his knee, fingering it idly.

"What did you say to them?" she asked.

"I told them I was the proud father of ten children," he replied. "That
seemed to stagger them, but only for a moment. They offered to take us
all to the Louvre."

"Peter, you are ridiculous! But, in spite of your nationality, you don't
look exactly gullible."

"That is a relief," he said. "I had begun to think I ought to leave my
address and my watch with the Consul General...."

Of such a nature was the first insidious rupture of that routine she had
grown to look upon as changeless for the years to come, of the life she
had chosen for its very immutable quality. Even its pangs of loneliness
had acquired a certain sweet taste. Partly from a fear of a world that
had hurt her, partly from fear of herself, she had made her burrow deep,
that heat and cold, the changing seasons, and love and hate might be
things far removed. She had sought to remove comparisons, too, from the
limits of her vision; to cherish and keep alive, indeed, such regrets as
she had, but to make no new ones.

Often had she thought of Peter Erwin, and it is not too much to say that
he had insensibly grown into an ideal. He had come to represent to her
the great thing she had missed in life, missed by feverish searching in
the wrong places, digging for gold where the ground had glittered. And,
if the choice had been given her, she would have preferred his spiritual
to his bodily companionship--for a while, at least. Some day, when she
should feel sure that desire had ceased to throb, when she should have
acquired an unshakable and absolute resignation, she would see him. It
is not too much to say, if her feeling be not misconstrued and stretched
far beyond her own conception of it, that he was her one remaining
interest in the world. She had scanned the letters of her aunt and uncle
for knowledge of his doings, and had felt her curiosity justified by a
certain proprietorship that she did not define, faith in humankind,
or the lack of it, usually makes itself felt through one's comparative
contemporaries. That her uncle was a good man, for instance, had no such
effect upon Honora, as the fact that Peter was a good man. And that he
had held a true course had gradually become a very vital thing to her,
p