rty ran
riot within her. If he thought with loathing on his former life, so did
she. Only a year ago she had been penned up in a New York street in that
prison-house of her own making, hemmed in by surroundings which she had
now learned to detest from her soul.

A few more penalties remained to be paid, and the heaviest of these was
her letter to her aunt and uncle. Even as they had accepted other things
in life, so had they accepted the hardest of all to bear--Honora's
divorce. A memorable letter her Uncle Tom had written her after Peter's
return to tell them that remonstrances were useless! She was their
daughter in all but name, and they would not forsake her. When she should
have obtained her divorce, she should go back to them. Their house, which
had been her home, should always remain so. Honora wept and pondered long
over that letter. Should she write and tell them the truth, as she had
told Peter? It was not because she was ashamed of the truth that she had
kept it from them throughout the winter: it was because she wished to
spare them as long as possible. Cruellest circumstance of all, that a
love so divine as hers should not be understood by them, and should cause
them infinite pain!

The weeks and months slipped by. Their letters, after that first one,
were such as she had always received from them: accounts of the weather,
and of the doings of her friends at home. But now the time was at hand
when she must prepare them for her marriage with Chiltern; for they would
expect her in St. Louis, and she could not go there. And if she wrote
them, they might try to stop the marriage, or at least to delay it for
some years.

Was it possible that a lingering doubt remained in her mind that to
postpone her happiness would perhaps be to lose it? In her exile she had
learned enough to know that a divorced woman is like a rudderless ship at
sea, at the mercy of wind and wave and current. She could not go back to
her life in St. Louis: her situation there would be unbearable: her
friends would not be the same friends. No, she had crossed her Rubicon
and destroyed the bridge deep within her she felt that delay would be
fatal, both to her and Chiltern. Long enough had the banner of their love
been trailed in the dust.

Summer came again, with its anniversaries and its dragging, interminable
weeks: demoralizing summer, when Mrs. Mayo quite frankly appeared at her
side window in a dressing sacque, and Honora longed to do