“Honora?”

“Yes?” she answered, with a start.

“You missed me?  Look at me and tell me the truth.”

“The truth!” she faltered, and shuddered.  The contrast was too great —­the horror of it too great for her to speak of.  The pen of Dante had not been adequate.  “Don’t ask me, Hugh,” she begged, “I can’t talk about it—­I never shall be able to talk about it.  If I had not loved you, I should have died.”

How deeply he felt and understood and sympathized she knew by the quivering pressure on her hand.  Ah, if he had not!  If he had failed to grasp the meaning of her purgatory.

“You are wonderful, Honora,” was what he said in a voice broken by emotion.

She thanked him with one fleeting, tearful glance that was as a grant of all her priceless possessions.  The carriage stopped, but it was some moments before they realized it.

“You may come up in a little while,” she whispered, “and lunch with me —­if you like.”

“If I like!” he repeated.

But she was on the sidewalk, following the bell boy into the cool, marble-lined area of the hotel.  A smiling clerk handed her a pen, and set the new universe to rocking.

“Mrs. Leffingwell, I presume?  We have your telegram.”

Mrs. Leffingwell!  Who was that person?  For an instant she stood blankly holding the pen, and then she wrote rapidly, if a trifle unsteadily:  “Mrs. Leffingwell and maid.”  A pause.  Where was her home?  Then she added the words, “St. Louis.”

Her rooms were above the narrow canon of the side street, looking over the roofs of the inevitable brownstone fronts opposite.  While Mathilde, in the adjoining chamber, unpacked her bag, Honora stood gazing out of the sitting-room windows, trying to collect her thoughts.  Her spirits had unaccountably fallen, the sense of homelessness that had pursued her all these months overtaken her once more.  Never, never, she told herself, would she enter a hotel again alone; and when at last he came she clung to him with a passion that thrilled him the more because he could not understand it.

“Hugh—­you will care for me?” she cried.

He kissed away her tears.  He could not follow her; he only knew that what he held to him was a woman such as he had never known before.  Tender, and again strangely and fiercely tender:  an instrument of such miraculous delicacy as to respond, quivering, to the lightest touch; an harmonious and perfect blending of strength and weakness, of joy and sorrow,—­of all the warring elements in the world.  What he felt was the supreme masculine joy of possession.

At last they sat down on either side of the white cloth the waiter had laid, for even the gods must eat.  Not that our deified mortals ate much on this occasion.  Vesta presided once more, and after the feast was over gently led them down the slopes until certain practical affairs began to take shape in the mind of the man.  Presently he looked at his watch, and then at the woman, and made a suggestion.