ent and lack of breath--for the beautiful
lady sprang up and seized him in her arms, and called Mathilde, who
eventually brought a white and gold box. And while Abraham sat consuming
its contents in ecstasy he suddenly realized that the beautiful lady
had forgotten him. She had picked up the letters, every one, and stood
reading them with parted lips and staring eyes.

It was Mathilde who saved him from a violent illness, closing the box
and leading him downstairs, and whispered something incomprehensible in
his ear as she pointed him homeward.

"Le vrai medecin--c'est toi, mon mignon."

There was a reason why Chiltern's letters had not arrived, and great
were Honora's self-reproach and penitence. With a party of Englishmen
he had gone up into the interior of a Central American country to
visit some famous ruins. He sent her photographs of them, and of the
Englishmen, and of himself. Yes, he had seen the newspapers. If she had
not seen them, she was not to read them if they came to her. And if she
had, she was to remember that their love was too sacred to be soiled,
and too perfect to be troubled. As for himself, as she knew, he was a
changed man, who thought of his former life with loathing. She had made
him clean, and filled him with a new strength.

The winter passed. The last snow melted on the little grass plot, which
changed by patches from brown to emerald green; and the children ran
over it again, and tracked it in the soft places, but Honora only
smiled. Warm, still days were interspersed between the windy ones, when
the sky was turquoise blue, when the very river banks were steeped in
new colours, when the distant, shadowy mountains became real. Liberty
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