Honora had found it impossible to unravel the tangled skein of their relationship, and to assign a definite amount of blame to each.  She did not shirk hers, and was willing to accept a full measure.  That she had done wrong in marrying him, and again in leaving him to marry another man, she acknowledged freely.  Wrong as she knew this to have been, severely though she had been punished for it, she could not bring herself to an adequate penitence.  She tried to remember him as he had been at Silverdale, and in the first months of their marriage, and not as he had afterwards become.  There was no question in her mind, now that it was given her to see things more clearly, that she might have tried harder, much harder, to make their marriage a success.  He might, indeed, have done more to protect and cherish her.  It was a man’s part to guard a woman against the evils with which she had been surrounded.  On the other hand, she could not escape the fact, nor did she attempt to escape it, that she had had the more light of the two:  and that, though the task were formidable, she might have fought to retain that light and infuse him with it.

That she did not hold herself guiltless is the important point.  Many of her hours were spent in retrospection.  She was, in a sense, as one dead, yet retaining her faculties; and these became infinitely keen now that she was deprived of the power to use them as guides through life.  She felt that the power had come too late, like a legacy when one is old.  And she contemplated the Honora of other days—­of the flesh, as though she were now the spirit departed from that body; sorrowfully, poignantly regretful of the earthly motives, of the tarnished ideals by which it had been animated and led to destruction.

Even Hugh Chiltern had left her no illusions.  She thought of him at tunes with much tenderness; whether she still loved him or not she could not say.  She came to the conclusion that all capacity for intense feeling had been burned out of her.  And she found that she could permit her mind to rest upon no period of her sojourn at Grenoble without a sense of horror; there had been no hour when she had seemed secure from haunting terror, no day that had not added its mite to the gathering evidence of an ultimate retribution.  And it was like a nightmare to summon again this spectacle of the man going to pieces under her eyes.  The whole incident in her life as time wore on assumed an aspect bizarre, incredible, as the follies of a night of madness appear in the saner light of morning.  Her great love had bereft her of her senses, for had the least grain of sanity remained to her she might have known that the thing they attempted was impossible of accomplishment.

Her feeling now, after four years, might be described as relief.  To employ again the figure of the castaway, she often wondered why she of all others had been rescued from the tortures of slow drowning and thrown up on an island.  What had she done above the others to deserve preservation?  It was inevitable that she should on occasions picture to herself the years with him that would have stretched ahead, even as the vision of them had come to her that morning when, in obedience to his telegram, she had told Starling to prepare for guests.  Her escape had indeed been miraculous!