There was an inclosure for Kate.  It read:—­

     “MY DEAR MISS BARRINGTON:—­

“I see that you’re one of the folk who can be counted on.  You help Honora out of this and then tell me what I can do for you.  I’d get to her some way even with this miserable plaster-of-Paris leg of mine if you weren’t there.  But I know you’ll play the cards right.  Can’t you come with her and stay with her awhile till she’s more used to the change?  You’d be as welcome as sunlight.  But I don’t even need to say that.  I saw you only a moment, yet I think you know that I’d count it a rich day if I could see you again.  You are one of those who understand a thing without having it bellowed by megaphone.

“Don’t mind my emphatic English.  I’m upset.  I feel like murdering a man, and the sensation isn’t pleasant.  Using language is too common out here to attract attention—­even on the part of the man who uses it.  Oh, my poor Honora!  Look after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to your own.  It will make quite a sum.  Yours faithfully,

     “KARL WANDER.”

“He wrote to you, too?” inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note.

“Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way.”

“Shall I go?”

“What else offers?”

“Nothing,” said Honora in her dead voice.  “If I kept a diary, I would be like that sad king of France who recorded ‘Rien’ each day.”

Kate made a practical answer.

“We must pack,” she said.

“But the house—­”

“Let it stand empty if the owner can’t find a tenant.  Pay your rent till he does, if that’s in the contract.  What difference does all that make?  Get out where you’ll have a chance to recuperate.”

“Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall?  How does a person recuperate from shame?”

“There isn’t really any shame to you in what others do,” Kate said.

“But you—­you’ll have to go somewhere.”

“So I shall.  Don’t worry about me.  I shall take good care of myself.”

Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner.

“I don’t see how I’m going to go through with it all,” she said, shuddering.

So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was begun.  It was an ordeal—­even a greater ordeal than they had thought it would be.  Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that were severed.