one through experience.

In the long days that followed she thought much about Peter, and failed
to comprehend her feelings towards him. She told herself that she ought
to hate him for what he had so cruelly said, and at times indeed her
resentment was akin to hatred: again, his face rose before her as she had
seen it when he had left her, and she was swept by an incomprehensible
wave of tenderness and reverence. And yet--paradox of paradoxes
--Chiltern possessed her!

On the days when his letters came it was as his emissary that the sun
shone to give her light in darkness, and she went about the house with a
song on her lips. They were filled, these letters, with an elixir of
which she drank thirstily to behold visions, and the weariness of her
exile fell away. The elixir of High Purpose. Never was love on such a
plane! He lifting her,--no marvel in this; and she--by a magic power of
levitation at which she never ceased to wonder--sustaining him. By her
aid he would make something of himself which would be worthy of her. At
last he had the incentive to enable him to take his place in the world.
He pictured their future life at Grenoble until her heart was strained
with yearning for it to begin. Here would be duty,--let him who would
gainsay it, duty and love combined with a wondrous happiness. He at a
man's labour, she at a woman's; labour not for themselves alone, but for
others. A paradise such as never was heard of--a God-fearing paradise,
and the reward of courage.

He told her he could not go to Grenoble now and begin the life without
her. Until that blessed time he would remain a wanderer, avoiding the
haunts of men. First he had cruised in the 'Folly, and then camped and
shot in Canada; and again, as winter drew on apace, had chartered another
yacht, a larger one, and sailed away for the West Indies, whence the
letters came, stamped in strange ports, and sometimes as many as five
together. He, too, was in exile until his regeneration should begin.

Well he might be at such a time. One bright day in early winter Honora,
returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters,
found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand.
It matters not whose hand: Honora never sought to know. She had long
regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and the long
nights of tears when entire paragraphs of the loathed stuff she had
burned ran ceaselessly in her mind. Would s