indeed that she awoke! She reached the platform to confront a group
of upturned, staring faces, and for the moment her courage failed her.
Somehow, with Chiltern's help, she made her way to a waiting omnibus
backed up against the boards. The footman touched his hat, the
grey-headed coachman saluted, and they got in. As the horses started off
at a quick trot, Honora saw that the group on the station platform had
with one consent swung about to stare after them.

They passed through the main street of the town, lined with plate-glass
windows and lively signs, and already bustling with the business of the
day, through humbler thoroughfares, and presently rumbled over a bridge
that spanned a rushing stream confined between the foundation walls of
mills. Hundreds of yards of mills stretched away on either side; mills
with windows wide open, and within them Honora heard the clicking and
roaring of machinery, and saw the men and women at their daily tasks.
Life was a strange thing that they should be doing this while she should
be going to live in luxury at a great country place. On one of the walls
she read the legend Chiltern and Company.

"They still keep our name," said Hugh, "although they are in the trust."

He pointed out to her, with an air of pride, every landmark by the
roadside. In future they were to have a new meaning--they were to be
shared with her. And he spoke of the times--as child and youth, home from
the seashore or college, he had driven over the same road. It wound to
the left, behind the mills, threaded a village of neat wooden houses
where the better class of operatives lived, reached the river again, and
turned at last through a brick gateway, past a lodge in the dense shade
of sheltering boughs, into a wooded drive that climbed, by gentle
degrees, a slope. Human care for generations had given to the place a
tradition. People had lived here and loved those trees--his people. And
could it be that she was to inherit all this, with him? Was her name
really Chiltern?

The beating of her heart became a pain when in the distance through the
spreading branches she caught a glimpse of the long, low outline of the
house, a vision at once familiar and unreal. How often in the months gone
by had she called up the memory of the photograph she had once seen, only
to doubt the more that she should ever behold that house and these trees
with him by her side! They drew up before the door, and a venerable,
ruddy-fac