f him at tunes
with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she could not
say. She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense feeling had
been burned out of her. And she found that she could permit her mind to
rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a sense of horror;
there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from haunting terror,
no day that had not added its mite to the gathering evidence of an
ultimate retribution. And it was like a nightmare to summon again this
spectacle of the man going to pieces under her eyes. The whole incident
in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect bizarre, incredible, as the
follies of a night of madness appear in the saner light of morning. Her
great love had bereft her of her senses, for had the least grain of
sanity remained to her she might have known that the thing they attempted
was impossible of accomplishment.

Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief. To
employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she of
all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and thrown
up on an island. What had she done above the others to deserve
preservation? It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to
herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the
vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his
telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests. Her escape had
indeed been miraculous!

Although they had passed through a ceremony, the conviction had never
taken root in her that she had been married to Chiltern. The tie that had
united her to him had not been sacred, though it had been no less
binding; more so, in fact. That tie would have become a shackle. Her
perception of this, after his death, had led her to instruct her attorney
to send back to his relatives all but a small income from his estate,
enough for her to live on during her lifetime. There had been some
trouble about this matter; Mrs. Grainger, in particular, had surprised
her in making objections, and had finally written a letter which Honora
received with a feeling akin to gratitude. Whether her own action had
softened this lady's feelings, she never understood; she had cherished
the letter for its unexpectedly charitable expressions. Chiltern's family
had at last agreed to accept the estate on the condition that the income
mentioned should be tripled. And to this Hono