One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of
all the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and
complete recovery of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room;
it accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed
out at her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from
the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian
teapot. It was as if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused
apprehensions of the previous day, with their moment of sharp
concentration about the newspaper article,--as if this dim
questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past,--
had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral
obligation. If she had indeed been careless of her husband's
affairs, it was, her new state seemed to prove, because her faith
in him instinctively justified such carelessness; and his right
to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed itself in the very face
of menace and suspicion. She had never seen him more untroubled,
more naturally and unconsciously in possession of himself, than
after the cross-examination to which she had subjected him: it
was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking doubts, and had
wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that
surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from
the house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne
at his desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door,
by a last peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his
mouth, above his papers, and now she had her own morning's task