“Why do you say I’ll never come back?” asked Honora.  “Of course I shall come back, and live here all the rest of my life.”

Peter shook his head slowly.  He had recovered something of his customary quizzical manner.

“The East is a strange country,” he said.  “The first thing we know you’ll be marrying one of those people we read about, with more millions than there are cars on the Olive Street line.”

Honora was a little indignant.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk so, Peter,” she said.  “In the first place, I shan’t see any but girls at Sutcliffe.  I could only see you for a few minutes once a week if you were there.  And in the second place, it isn’t exactly—­Well—­dignified to compare the East and the West the way you do, and speak about people who are very rich and live there as though they were different from the people we know here.  Comparisons, as Shakespeare said, are odorous.”

“Honora,” he declared, still shaking his head, “you’re a fraud, but I can’t help loving you.”

For a long time that night Honora lay in bed staring into the darkness, and trying to realize what had happened.  She heard the whistling and the puffing of the trains in the cinder-covered valley to the southward, but the quality of these sounds had changed.  They were music now.

CHAPTER VI

HONORA HAS A GLIMPSE OF THE WORLD

It is simply impossible to give any adequate notion of the industry of the days that followed.  No sooner was Uncle Tom out of the house in the morning than Anne Rory marched into the sitting-room and took command, and turned it, into a dressmaking establishment.  Anne Rory, who deserves more than a passing mention, one of the institutions of Honora’s youth, who sewed for the first families, and knew much more about them than Mr. Meeker, the dancing-master.  If you enjoyed her confidence,—­as Aunt Mary did,—­she would tell you of her own accord who gave their servants enough to eat, and who didn’t.  Anne Rory was a sort of inquisition all by herself, and would have made a valuable chief of police.  The reputations of certain elderly gentlemen of wealth might have remained to this day intact had it not been for her; she had a heaven-sent knack of discovering peccadilloes.  Anne Rory knew the gentlemen by sight, and the gentlemen did not know Anne Rory.  Uncle Tom she held to be somewhere in the calendar of the saints.

There is not time, alas, to linger over Anne Rory or the new histories which she whispered to Aunt Mary when Honora was out of the room.  At last the eventful day of departure arrived.  Honora’s new trunk—­her first—­was packed by Aunt Mary’s own hands, the dainty clothes and the dresses folded in tissue paper, while old Catherine stood sniffing by.  After dinner—­sign of a great occasion—­a carriage came from Braintree’s Livery Stable, and Uncle Tom held the horses while the driver carried out the trunk