She sat stunned, knowing that the real pain would come later.  That which slowly awoke in her now, as he paced the room, was a high sense of danger, and a persistent inability to regard the man who had insulted her as her husband.  He was rather an enemy to them both, and he would overturn, if he could, the frail craft of their happiness in the storm.  She cried out to Hugh as across the waters.

“No,—­I have no pride, Hugh,—­it is gone.  I have thought of you only.  The fear that I might separate you from your family, from your friends, and ruin your future has killed my pride.  He—­Mr. Grainger meant to be kind.  He is always like that—­it’s his way of saying things.  He wishes to show that he is friendly to you—­to me—­”

“In spite of my relations,” cried Chiltern, stopping in the middle of the room.  “They cease to be my relations from this day.  I disown them.  I say it deliberately.  So long as I live, not one of them shall come into this house.  All my life they have begged me to settle down, to come up here and live the life my father did.  Very well, now I’ve done it.  And I wrote to them and told them that I intended to live henceforth like a gentleman and a decent citizen—­more than some of them do.  No, I wash my hands of them.  If they were to crawl up here from the gate on their knees, I’d turn them out.”

Although he could not hear her, she continued to plead.

“Hugh, try to think of how—­how our marriage must have appeared to them.  Not that I blame you for being angry.  We only thought of one thing—­our love—­” her voice broke at the word, “and our own happiness.  We did not consider others.  It is that which sometimes has made me afraid, that we believed ourselves above the law.  And now that we have—­begun so well, don’t spoil it, Hugh!  Give them time, let them see by our works that we are in earnest, that we intend to live useful lives.

“I don’t mean to beg them,” she cried, at sight of his eyes.  “Oh, I don’t mean that.  I don’t mean to entreat them, or even to communicate with them.  But they are your flesh and blood—­you must remember that.  Let us prove that we are—­not—­like the others,” she said, lifting her head, “and then it cannot matter to us what any one thinks.  We shall have justified our act to ourselves.”

But he was striding up and down the room again.  It was as she feared —­her plea—­had fallen on unheeding ears.  A sudden convulsive leaping of the inner fires sent him to his desk, and he seized some note-paper from the rack.  Honora rose to her feet, and took a step towards him.

“Hugh—­what are you going to do?”

“Do!” he cried, swinging in his chair and facing her, “I’m going to do what any man with an ounce of self-respect would do under the circumstances.  I’m going to do what I was a fool not to have done three months ago—­what I should have done if it hadn’t been for you.  If in their contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for me.  If it’s the last act of my life I’m going to tell them so.”