ternoon--if you'll let me
--when I get through my work," said the little woman.

"I wish you would," replied Honora.

She had much to think of on her walk that morning, and new resolutions to
make. Here was happiness growing and thriving, so far as she could see,
without any of that rarer nourishment she had once thought so necessary.
And she had come two thousand miles to behold it.

She walked many miles, as a part of the regimen and discipline to which
she had set herself. Her haunting horror in this place, as she thought of
the colony of which Mr. Beckwith had spoken and of Mrs. Boutwell's row of
French novels, was degeneration. She was resolved to return to Chiltern a
better and a wiser and a truer woman, unstained by the ordeal. At the
outskirts of the town she halted by the river's bank, breathing deeply of
the pure air of the vast plains that surrounded her.

She was seated that afternoon at her desk in the sitting-room upstairs
when she heard the tinkle of the door-bell, and remembered her
neighbour's promise to call. With something of a pang she pushed back her
chair. Since the episode of the morning, the friendship of the little
woman had grown to have a definite value; for it was no small thing, in
Honora's situation, to feel the presence of a warm heart next door. All
day she had been thinking of Mrs. Mayo and her strange happiness, and
longing to talk with her again, and dreading it. And while she was
bracing herself for the trial Mathilde entered with a card.

"Tell Mrs. Mayo I shall be down in a minute," she said.

It was not a lady, Mathilde replied, but a monsieur.

Honora took the card. For a long time she sat staring at it, while
Mathilde waited. It read:

Mr. Peter Erwin.

"Madame will see monsieur?"

A great sculptor once said to the statesman who was to be his model:
"Wear your old coat. There is as much of a man in the back of his old
coat, I think, as there is in his face." As Honora halted on the
threshold, Peter was standing looking out of the five-foot plate-glass
window, and his back was to her.

She was suddenly stricken. Not since she had been a child, not even in
the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain. And as a child, self-pity
seized her--as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will
fails and distance appalls. Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she
seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he
heard. He turned