As she climbed the stairs she saw him gravely closing the doors.  She paused on the landing, her sense of relief overborne by a greater sense of defeat.  There was still time!  She heard the wheels of the carriage on the circle—­yet she listened to them die away.  Starling softly caught the latch, and glanced up.  For an instant their looks crossed, and she hurried on with palpitating breast, reached her boudoir, and closed the door.  The walls seemed to frown on her, and she remembered that the sitting-room in St. Louis had worn that same look when, as a child, she had feigned illness in order to miss a day at school.  With a leaden heart she gazed out on the waste of melting snow, and then tried in vain to read a novel that a review had declared amusing.  But a question always came between her and the pages:  was this the turning point of that silent but terrible struggle, when she must acknowledge to herself that the world had been too strong for her?  After a while her loneliness became unbearable.  Chiltern was in the library.

“Home from church?” he inquired.

“I didn’t go, Hugh.”

He looked up in surprise.

“Why, I thought I saw you start,” he said.

“It’s such a dreary day, Hugh.”

“But that has never prevented you before.”

“Don’t you think I’m entitled to one holiday?” she asked.

But it was by a supreme effort she kept back the tears.  He looked at her attentively, and got up suddenly and put his hands upon her shoulders.  She could not meet his eyes, and trembled under his touch.

“Honora,” he said, “why don’t you tell me the truth?”

“What do you mean, Hugh?”

“I have been wondering how long you’d stand it.  I mean that these women, who call themselves Christians, have been brutal to you.  They haven’t so much as spoken to you in church, and not one of them has been to this house to call.  Isn’t that so?”

“Don’t let us judge them yet, Hugh,” she begged, a little wildly, feeling again the gathering of another destroying storm in him that might now sweep the last vestige of hope away.  And she seized the arguments as they came.  “Some of them may be prejudiced, I know.  But others—­others I am sure are kind, and they have had no reason to believe I should like to know them—­to work among them.  I—­I could not go to see them first, I am glad to wait patiently until some accident brings me near them.  And remember, Hugh, the atmosphere in which we both lived before we came here—­an atmosphere they regard as frivolous and pleasure-loving.  People who are accustomed to it are not usually supposed to care to make friends in a village, or to bother their heads about the improvement of a community.  Society is not what it was in your mother’s day, who knew these people or their mothers, and took an interest in what they were doing.  Perhaps they think me—­haughty.”  She tried to smile.  “I have never had an opportunity to show them that I am not.”