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