And she?  Would she die?  What would become of her?  When she thought of the long days and months and years that stretched ahead of her, she felt that her soul would not be able to survive the process of steady degradation to which it was sure to be subjected.  For she was a prisoner:  the uttermost parts of the earth offered no refuge.  To-day, she knew, was to see the formal inauguration of that process.  She had known torture, but it had been swift, obliterating, excruciating.  And hereafter it was to be slow, one turn at a time of the screws, squeezing by infinitesimal degrees the life out of her soul.  And in the end—­most fearful thought of all—­in the end, painless.  Painless!  She buried her head in her arms on the little desk, shaken by sobs.

How she fought that day to compose herself, fought and prayed!  Prayed wildly to a God whose help, nevertheless, she felt she had forfeited, who was visiting her with just anger.  At half-past four she heard the carriage on the far driveway, going to the station, and she went down and walked across the lawn to the pond, and around it; anything to keep moving.  She hurried back to the house just in time to reach the hall as the omnibus backed up.  And the first person she saw descend, after Hugh, was Mrs. Kame.

“Here we are, Honora,” she cried.  “I hope you’re glad to see us, and that you’ll forgive our coming so informally.  You must blame Hugh.  We’ve brought Adele.”

The second lady was, indeed, none other than Mrs. Eustace Rindge, formerly Mrs. Dicky Farnham.  And she is worth—­even at this belated stage in our chronicle an attempted sketch, or at least an attempted impression.  She was fair, and slim as a schoolgirl; not very tall, not exactly petite; at first sight she might have been taken for a particularly immature debutante, and her dress was youthful and rather mannish.  Her years, at this period of her career, were in truth but two and twenty, yet she had contrived, in the comparatively brief time since she had reached the supposed age of discretion, to marry two men and build two houses, and incidentally to see a considerable portion of what is known as the world.  The suspicion that she was not as innocent as a dove came to one, on closer inspection, as a shock:  her eyes were tired, though not from loss of sleep; and her manner—­how shall it be described to those whose happy lot in life has never been to have made the acquaintance of Mrs. Rindge’s humbler sisters who have acquired—­more coarsely, it is true—­the same camaraderie?  She was one of those for whom, seemingly, sex does not exist.  Her air of good-fellowship with men was eloquent of a precise knowledge of what she might expect from them, and she was prepared to do her own policing,—­not from any deep moral convictions.  She belonged, logically, to that world which is disposed to take the law into its own hands, and she was the possessor of five millions of dollars.