“Give me my hat, will you?” he cried to the farmer.

To her surprise the man obeyed.  Chiltern leaped to the ground.

“What do you want for him?” he demanded.

“I’ll take five hundred dollars.”

“Bring him over in the morning,” said Chiltern, curtly.

They rode homeward in silence.  Honora had not been able to raise her voice against the purchase, and she seemed powerless now to warn her husband of the man’s enmity.  She was thinking, rather, of the horror of the tragedy written on the farmer’s face, to which he had given her the key:  Hugh Chiltern, to whom she had intrusted her life and granted her all, had done this thing, ruthlessly, even as he had satisfied to-day his unbridled cravings in maltreating a horse!  And she thought of that other woman, on whose picture she had refused to look.  What was the essential difference between that woman and herself?  He had wanted them both, he had taken them both for his pleasure, heedless of the pain he might cause to others and to them.  For her, perhaps, the higher organism, had been reserved the higher torture.  She did not know.  The vision of the girl in the outer darkness reserved for castaways was terrible.

Up to this point she had, as it were, been looking into one mirror.  Now another was suddenly raised behind her, and by its aid she beheld not a single, but countless, images of herself endlessly repeated.  How many others besides this girl had there been?  The question gave her the shudder of the contemplation of eternity.  It was not the first time Honora had thought of his past, but until today it had lacked reality; until to-day she had clung to the belief that he had been misunderstood; until to-day she had considered those acts of his of the existence of which she was collectively aware under the generic term of wild oats.  He had had too much money, and none had known how to control him.  Now, through this concrete example of another’s experience, she was given to understand that which she had strangely been unable to learn from her own.  And she had fancied, in her folly, that she could control him!  Unable as yet to grasp the full extent of her calamity, she rode on by his side, until she was aware at last that they had reached the door of the house at Highlawns.

“You look pale,” he said as he lifted her off her horse.  The demon in him, she perceived, was tired.

“Do I?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” she answered.

He laughed.

“It’s confoundedly silly to get frightened that way,” he declared.  “The beast only wants riding.”

Three mornings later she was seated in the garden with a frame of fancy work.  Sometimes she put it down.  The weather was overcast, langourous, and there was a feeling of rain in the air.  Chiltern came in through the gaffe, and looked at her.

“I’m going to New York on the noon train,” he said.