nd
its president under indictment at the hour of his demise. Her feelings at
the time, and for months after, were complex. She had been moved to deep
pity, for in spite of what he had told her of his business transactions,
it was impossible for her to think of him as a criminal. That he had been
the tool of others, she knew, but it remained a question in her mind how
clearly he had perceived the immorality of his course, and of theirs. He
had not been given to casuistry, and he had been brought up in a school
the motto of which he had once succinctly stated: the survival of the
fittest. He had not been, alas, one of those to survive.

Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their
relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each. She did
not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure. That she had
done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another
man, she acknowledged freely. Wrong as she knew this to have been,
severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring herself
to an adequate penitence. She tried to remember him as he had been at
Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not as he had
afterwards become. There was no question in her mind, now that it was
given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried harder,
much harder, to make their marriage a success. He might, indeed, have
done more to protect and cherish her. It was a man's part to guard a
woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded. On the other
hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape it,
that she had had the more light of the two: and that, though the task
were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and infuse
him with it.

That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point. Many 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 o