e 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 and crossed the room to her as she had known he would,
and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt
and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her. For the moment, the delusion
that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again,
so many times had he mended a world all awry.

He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his
shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own. He did not
speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to
tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.

"Why did you come? Why did you come?" she cried.

"To see you, Honora."

"But you might have--warned me."

"Yes," he said, "it's true, I might."

She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.

"Why aren't you angry?" she said. "You don't believe in what I have
done--you don't sympathize with it--you don't understand it."

"I have come her