em. Her heart, at the mere conjecture, turned to stone.

During the cruise of the Adhemar she had often watched, in the gathering
darkness, those revolving lights on headland or shoal that spread now a
bright band across the sea, and again left the waters desolate in the
night. Thus, ceaselessly revolving from white hope to darker doubt, were
her thoughts, until sometimes she feared to be alone with them, and
surprised him by her presence in his busiest moments. For he was going
ahead on the path they had marked out with a faith in which she could
perceive no flaw. If faint and shadowy forms had already come between
them, he gave no evidence of having as yet discerned these. There was the
absence of news from his family, for instance,--the Graingers, the
Stranger, the Shorters, and the Pendletons, whom she had never seen; he
had never spoken to her of this, and he seemed to hold it as of no
account. Her instinct whispered that it had left its mark, a hidden mark.
And while she knew that consideration for her prompted him to hold his
peace, she told herself that she would have been happier had he spoken of
it.

Always she was brought back to Grenoble when she saw him thus, manlike,
with his gaze steadily fixed on the task. If New York itself withheld
recognition, could Grenoble--provincial and conservative Grenoble,
preserving still the ideas of the last century for which his family had
so unflinchingly stood--be expected to accord it? New York! New York was
many, many things, she knew. The great house could have been filled from
weekend to week-end from New York; but not with Graingers and Pendletons
and Stranger; not with those around the walls of whose fortresses the
currents of modernity still swept impotently; not with those who, while
not contemning pleasure, still acknowledged duty; not with those whose
assured future was that for which she might have sold her soul itself.
Social free lances, undoubtedly, and unattached men; those who lived in
the world of fashion but were not squeamish--Mrs. Kame, for example; and
ladies like Mrs. Eustace Rindge, who had tried a second throw for
happiness,--such votaries of excitement would undoubtedly have been more
than glad to avail themselves of the secluded hospitality of Grenoble for
that which they would have been pleased to designate as "a lively time."
Honora shuddered at the thought: And, as though the shudder had been
prophetic, one morning the mail contained a letter