CHAPTER I

So long as ye both shall live!

It was late November.  And as Honora sat at the window of the drawing-room of the sleeping car, life seemed as fantastic and unreal as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared.  She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into the unknown.  The monotony of existence was at last broken, and riven the circumscribing walls.  Limitless possibilities lay ahead.

The emancipation had not been without its pangs of sorrow, and there were moments of retrospection—­as now.  She saw herself on Uncle Tom’s arm, walking up the aisle of the old church.  How many Sundays of her life had she sat watching a shaft of sunlight strike across the stone pillars of its gothic arches!  She saw, in the chancel, tall and grave and pale, Peter Erwin standing beside the man with the flushed face who was to be her husband.  She heard again the familiar voice of Dr. Ewing reciting the words of that wonderful introduction.  At other weddings she had been moved.  Why was her own so unrealizable?

“Honora, wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy state of Matrimony?  Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?”

She had promised.  And they were walking out of the church, facing the great rose window with its blended colours, and the vaults above were ringing now with the volume of an immortal march.

After that an illogical series of events and pictures passed before her.  She was in a corner of the carriage, her veil raised, gazing at her husband, who had kissed her passionately.  He was there beside her, looking extremely well in his top hat and frock-coat, with a white flower in his buttonhole.  He was the representative of the future she had deliberately chosen.  And yet, by virtue of the strange ceremony through which they had passed, he seemed to have changed.  In her attempt to seize upon a reality she looked out of the window.  They were just passing the Hanbury mansion in Wayland Square, and her eyes fell upon the playroom windows under the wide cornice; and she wondered whether the doll’s house were still in its place, its mute inhabitants waiting to be called by the names she had given them, and quickened into life once more.

Next she recalled the arrival at the little house that had been her home, summer and winter, for so many years of her life.  A red and white awning, stretching up the length of the walk which once had run beside the tall pear trees, gave it an unrecognizable, gala air.  Long had it stood there, patient, unpretentious, content that the great things should pass it by!  And now, modest still, it had been singled out from amongst its neighbours and honoured.  Was it honoured?  It seemed to Honora, so fanciful this day, that its unwonted air of festival was unnatural.  Why should the hour of departure from such a harbour of peace be celebrated?