"Your wife,

"MARGERY PENDYCE."

Just as there was nothing violent in her manner of taking this step,
so there was nothing violent in her conception of it. To her it was
not running away, a setting of her husband at defiance; there was no
concealment of address, no melodramatic "I cannot come back to you."
Such methods, such pistol-holdings, would have seemed to her ridiculous.
It is true that practical details, such as the financial consequences,
escaped the grasp of her mind, but even in this, her view, or rather
lack of view, was really the wide, the even one. Horace would not let
her starve: the idea was inconceivable. There was, too, her own three
hundred a year. She had, indeed, no idea how much this meant, or what
it represented, neither was she concerned, for she said to herself, "I
should be quite happy in a cottage with Roy and my flowers;" and though,
of course, she had not the smallest experience to go by, it was quite
possible that she was right. Things which to others came only by money,
to a Totteridge came without, and even if they came not, could well
be dispensed with--for to this quality of soul, this gentle
self-sufficiency, had the ages worked to bring her.

Yet it was hastily and with her head bent that she stepped from the
carriage at the station, and the old Skye, who from the brougham seat
could just see out of the window, from the tears on his nose that were
not his own, from something in his heart that was, knew this was no
common parting and whined behind the glass.

Mrs. Pendyce told her cabman to drive to Green's Hotel, and it was only
after she had arrived, arranged her things, washed, and had lunch, that
the beginnings of confusion and home-sickness stirred within her. Up to
then a simmering excitement had kept her from thinking of how she was
to act, or of what she had hoped, expected, dreamed, would come of her
proceedings. Taking her sunshade, she walked out into Bond Street.

A passing man took off his hat.

'Dear me,' she thought, 'who was that? I ought to know!'

She had a rather vague memory for faces, and though she could not recall
his name, felt more at home at once, not so lonely and adrift. Soon a
quaint brightness showed in her eyes, looking at the toilettes of the
passers-by, and at each shop-front, more engrossing than the last.
Pleasure, like that which touches the soul of a young girl at her first
dance, the souls of men landing on strange shores, touched Margery