Before he could answer, she was already halfway up the garden path towards the house.  He followed her as she ran panting through the breakfast room, the dining room, and drawing-room, and when they reached the hall, Starling, the butler, and two footmen were going out at the door.  A voice—­Mrs. Kame’s—­cried out, “What is it?” over the stairs, but they paid no heed.  As they reached the steps they beheld the slight figure of Mrs. Rindge on a flying horse coming towards them up the driveway.  Her black straw hat had slipped to the back of her neck, her hair was awry, her childish face white as paper.  Honora put her hand to her heart.  There was no need to tell her the news—­she had known these many hours.

Mrs. Rindge’s horse came over the round grass-plot of the circle and planted his fore feet in the turf as she pulled him up.  She lurched forward.  It was Starling who lifted her off—­George Pembroke stood by Honora.

“My God, Adele,” he exclaimed, “why don’t you speak?”

She was staring at Honora.

“I can’t!” she cried.  “I can’t tell you—­it’s too terrible!  The horse—­” she seemed to choke.

It was Honora who went up to her with a calmness that awed them.

“Tell me,” she said, “is he dead?”

Mrs. Rindge nodded, and broke into hysterical sobbing.

“And I wanted to ride him myself,” she sobbed, as they led her up the steps.

In less than an hour they brought him home and laid him in the room in which he had slept from boyhood, and shut the door.  Honora looked into his face.  It was calm at last, and his body strangely at rest.  The passions which had tortured it and driven it hither and thither through a wayward life had fled:  the power gone that would brook no guiding hand, that had known no master.  It was not until then that she fell upon him, weeping . . . .

CHAPTER XVIII

IN WHICH MR. ERWIN SEEK PARIS

As she glanced around the sitting-room of her apartment in Paris one September morning she found it difficult, in some respects, to realize that she had lived in it for more than five years.  After Chiltern’s death she had sought a refuge, and she had found it here:  a refuge in which she meant—­if her intention may be so definitely stated—­to pass the remainder of her days.

As a refuge it had become dear to her.  When first she had entered it she had looked about her numbly, thankful for walls and roof, thankful for its remoteness from the haunts of the prying:  as a shipwrecked castaway regards, at the first light, the cave into which he has stumbled into the darkness-gratefully.  And gradually, castaway that she felt herself to be, she had adorned it lovingly, as one above whose horizon the sails of hope were not to rise; filled it with friends not chosen in a day, whose faithful ministrations were not to cease.  Her books, but only those worthy to be bound and read again; the pictures she had bought when she had grown to know what pictures were; the music she had come to love for its eternal qualities—­these were her companions.