She was standing beside her husband in the little parlour, while carriage doors slammed in the dusk outside; while one by one—­a pageant of the past which she was leaving forever the friends of her childhood came and went.  Laughter and tears and kisses!  And then, in no time at all, she found herself changing for the journey in the “little house under the hill.”  There, locked up in the little desk Cousin Eleanor had given her long ago, was the unfinished manuscript of that novel written at fever heat during those summer days in which she had sought to escape from a humdrum existence.  And now—­she had escaped.  Aunt Mary, helpful under the most trying circumstances, was putting her articles in a bag, the initials on which she did not recognize—­H.  L. S.—­Honora Leffingwell Spence; while old Catherine, tearful and inefficient, knelt before her, fumbling at her shoes.  Honora, bending over, took the face of the faithful old servant and kissed it.

“Don’t feel badly, Catherine,” she said; “I’ll be coming back often to see you, and you will be coming to see me.”

“Will ye, darlint?  The blessing of God be on you for those words—­and you to be such a fine lady!  It always was a fine lady ye were, with such a family and such a bringin’ up.  And now ye’ve married a rich man, as is right and proper.  If it’s rich as Croesus he was, he’d be none too good for you.”

“Catherine,” said Aunt Mary, reprovingly, “what ideas you put into the child’s head!”

“Sure, Miss Mary,” cried Catherine, “it’s always the great lady she was, and she a wee bit of a thing.  And wasn’t it yerself, Miss Mary, that dressed her like a princess?”

Then came the good-bys—­the real ones.  Uncle Tom, always the friend of young people, was surrounded by a group of bridesmaids in the hall.  She clung to him.  And Peter, who had the carriage ready.  What would her wedding have been without Peter?  As they drove towards the station, his was the image that remained persistently in her mind, bareheaded on the sidewalk in the light of the carriage lamps.  The image of struggle.

She had married Prosperity.  A whimsical question, that shocked her, irresistibly presented itself:  was it not Prosperity that she had promised to love, honour, and obey?

It must not be thought that Honora was by any means discontented with her Prosperity.  He was new—­that was all.  Howard looked new.  But she remembered that he had always looked new; such was one of his greatest charms.  In the long summer days since she had bade him good-by on her way through New York from Silverdale, Honora had constructed him:  he was perpetual yet sophisticated Youth; he was Finance and Fashion; he was Power in correctly cut clothes.  And when he had arrived in St. Louis to play his part in the wedding festivities, she had found her swan a swan indeed—­he was all that she had dreamed of him.  And she had tingled with pride as she introduced him to her friends, or gazed at him across the flower-laden table as he sat beside Edith Hanbury at the bridesmaids’ dinner in Wayland Square.