“It seems to me,” she said, “that in two days we have become astonishingly intimate.”

“Why shouldn’t we?” he demanded.

But she was not to be led into casuistry.

“I’ve been reading the biography you recommended,” she said.

He continued to look at her a moment, and laughed as he sat down beside her.  Later he walked home with her.  A dinner and bridge followed, and it was after midnight when she returned.  As her maid unfastened her gown she perceived that her pincushion had been replaced by the one she had received at the ball.

“Did you put that there, Mathilde?” she asked.

Mathilde had.  She had seen it on madame’s bureau, and thought madame wished it there.  She would replace the old one at once.

“No,” said Honora, “you may leave it, now.”

“Bien, madame,” said the maid, and glanced at her mistress, who appeared to have fallen into a revery.

It had seemed strange to her to hear people talking about him at the dinner that night, and once or twice her soul had sprung to arms to champion him, only to remember that her knowledge was special.  She alone of all of them understood, and she found herself exulting in the superiority.  The amazed comment when the heir to the Chiltern fortune had returned to the soil of his ancestors had been revived on his arrival in Newport.  Ned Carrington, amid much laughter, had quoted the lines about Prince Hal: 

          “To mock the expectations of the world,
          To frustrate prophecies.”

Honora disliked Mr. Carrington.

Perhaps the events of Thursday, would better be left in the confusion in which they remained in Honora’s mind.  She was awakened by penetrating, persistent, and mournful notes which for some time she could not identify, although they sounded oddly familiar; and it was not until she felt the dampness of the coverlet and looked at the white square of her open windows that she realized there was a fog.  And it had not lifted when Chiltern came in the afternoon.  They discussed literature—­but the book had fallen to the floor.  ‘Absit omen’!  If printing had then been invented, undoubtedly there would have been a book instead of an apple in the third chapter of Genesis.  He confided to her his plan of collecting his father’s letters and of writing the General’s life.  Honora, too, would enjoy writing a book.  Perhaps the thought of the pleasure of collaboration occurred to them both at once; it was Chiltern who wished that he might have her help in the difficult places; she had, he felt, the literary instinct.  It was not the Viking who was talking now.  And then, at last, he had risen reluctantly to leave.  The afternoon had flown.  She held out her hand with a frank smile.

“Good-by,” she said.  “Good-by, and good luck.”

“But I may not go,” he replied.

She stood dismayed.

“I thought you told me you were going on Friday—­to-morrow.”