reached
the hall, Starling, the butler, and two footmen were going out at the
door. A voice--Mrs. Kame's--cried out, "What is it?" over the stairs, but
they paid no heed. As they reached the steps they beheld the slight
figure of Mrs. Rindge on a flying horse coming towards them up the
driveway. Her black straw hat had slipped to the back of her neck, her
hair was awry, her childish face white as paper. Honora put her hand to
her heart. There was no need to tell her the news--she had known these
many hours.

Mrs. Rindge's horse came over the round grass-plot of the circle and
planted his fore feet in the turf as she pulled him up. She lurched
forward. It was Starling who lifted her off--George Pembroke stood by
Honora.

"My God, Adele," he exclaimed, "why don't you speak?"

She was staring at Honora.

"I can't!" she cried. "I can't tell you--it's too terrible! The horse--"
she seemed to choke.

It was Honora who went up to her with a calmness that awed them.

"Tell me," she said, "is he dead?"

Mrs. Rindge nodded, and broke into hysterical sobbing.

"And I wanted to ride him myself," she sobbed, as they led her up the
steps.

In less than an hour they brought him home and laid him in the room in
which he had slept from boyhood, and shut the door. Honora looked into
his face. It was calm at last, and his body strangely at rest. The
passions which had tortured it and driven it hither and thither through a
wayward life had fled: the power gone that would brook no guiding hand,
that had known no master. It was not until then that she fell upon him,
weeping . . . .

CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH MR. ERWIN SEEK PARIS

As she glanced around the sitting-room of her apartment in Paris one
September morning she found it difficult, in some respects, to realize
that she had lived in it for more than five years. After Chiltern's death
she had sought a refuge, and she had found it here: a refuge in which she
meant--if her intention may be so definitely stated--to pass the
remainder of her days.

As a refuge it had become dear to her. When first she had entered it she
had looked about her numbly, thankful for walls and roof, thankful for
its remoteness from the haunts of the prying: as a shipwrecked castaway
regards, at the first light, the cave into which he has stumbled into the
darkness-gratefully. And gradually, castaway that she felt herself to be,
she had adorned it lovingly, as one above whose horizon the sai