She thanked him.  Nor was his exquisite delicacy in laying stress upon the locality lost upon her.  That he realized the magnitude—­for her—­of the task to which she had set herself; that he sympathized deeply with the spirit which had undertaken it, she was as sure as though he had said so.  He helped her thus in a dozen unobtrusive ways, never once recognizing her ignorance; but he made her feel the more that that ignorance was a shameful thing not to be spoken of.  Speculations upon him were irresistible.  She was continually forgetting the nature of his situation, and he grew gradually to typify in her mind the Grenoble of the past.  She knew his principles as well as though he had spoken them—­which he never did.  For him, the world had become awry; he abhorred divorce, and that this modern abomination had touched the house of Chiltern was a calamity that had shaken the very foundations of his soul.  In spite of this, he had remained.  Why?  Perhaps from habit, perhaps from love of the family and Hugh,—­perhaps to see!

And having stayed, fascination had laid hold of him,—­of that she was sure,—­and his affections had incomprehensibly become involved.  He was as one assisting at a high tragedy not unworthy of him, the outcome of which he never for an instant doubted.  And he gave Honora the impression that he alone, inscrutable, could have pulled aside the curtain and revealed the end.

CHAPTER XIII

OF THE WORLD BEYOND THE GATES

Honora paused in her toilet, and contemplated for a moment the white skirt that her maid presented.

“I think I’ll wear the blue pongee to-day, Mathilde,” she said.

The decision for the blue pongee was the culmination of a struggle begun with the opening of her eyes that morning.  It was Sunday, and the time was at hand when she must face the world.  Might it not be delayed a little while—­a week longer?  For the remembrance of the staring eyes which had greeted her on her arrival at the station at Grenoble troubled her.  It seemed to her a cruel thing that the house of God should hold such terrors for her:  to-day she had a longing for it that she had never felt in her life before.

Chiltern was walking in the garden, waiting for her to breakfast with him, and her pose must have had in it an element of the self-conscious when she appeared, smilingly, at the door.

“Why, you’re all dressed up,” he said.

“It’s Sunday, Hugh.”

“So it is,” he agreed, with what may have been a studied lightness—­she could not tell.

“I’m going to church,” she said bravely.

“I can’t say much for old Stopford,” declared her husband.  “His sermons used to arouse all the original sin in me, when I had to listen to them.”

She poured out his coffee.

“I suppose one has to take one’s clergyman as one does the weather,” she said.  “We go to church for something else besides the sermon—­don’t we?”