r whom--to use her own phrase--she had
condemned to solitary confinement in the back attic, beat very
violently against her prison door just then in attempt to escape.

"Dear Cousin Katherine, good-night. Good-night, Richard," she said
hurriedly.--She went out of the room, lazily, slowly, down the black,
polished staircase, across the great, silent hall, and along the
farther lobby. But she let the Gun-Room door bang to behind her and
flung herself down in the armchair--in which, by the way, the old
bull-dog had died a year ago, broken-hearted by over long waiting for
the homecoming of his absent master. And then Honoria, though the least
tearful of women, wept--not in petulant anger, or with the easy,
luxuriously sentimental overflow common to feminine humanity, but
reluctantly, with hard, irregular sobs which hurt, yet refused to be
stifled, since the extreme limit of emotional and mental endurance had
been reached.

"Oh, it's fine!" she said, half aloud. "I can see that it's fine--but,
dear God, is there no way out of it? It's so horribly, so unspeakably
sad."

And Richard remained on into the small hours, sitting before the dying
fire of the big hearth-place, at the eastern end of the gallery.
Mentally he audited his accounts, the profit and loss of this day's
doing, and, on the whole, the balance showed upon the profit side.
Verily it was only a day of small things, of very humble ambitions, of
far from world-shaking successes! Still four persons, he judged, he had
made a degree or so happier.--His mother rejoiced, though with
trembling as yet, at his return to the ordinary habits of the ordinary
man.--Sweet, dear thing, small wonder that she trembled! He had led her
such a dance in the past, that any new departure must give cause for
anxious questionings. Dickie sunk his head in his hands.--God forgive
him, what a dance he had led her!--And Julius March was happier--he,
Richard, was pretty certain of that--since Julius could not but
understand that, in the present case at all events, neither fulfilment
of prophecy nor answer to prayer had been disregarded.--And the
hard-bitten, irascible, old trainer, Tom Chifney, was happier--probably
really the happiest of the lot--since he demanded nothing more
recondite and far-reaching than restoration to favour, and due
recognition of the importance of his calling and of the merits of his
horses.--And nice, funny, voluble, little Dick Ormiston was happier
too. Richard's