"Don't mind my emphatic English. I'm upset. I feel like murdering a man, and the sensation isn't pleasant. Using language is too common out here to attract attention--even on the part of the man who uses it. Oh, my poor Honora! Look after her, Miss Barrington, and add all my pity and love to your own. It will make quite a sum. Yours faithfully, "KARL WANDER." "He wrote to you, too?" inquired Honora when Kate had perused her note. "Yes, begging me to hasten you on your way." "Shall I go?" "What else offers?" "Nothing," said Honora in her dead voice. "If I kept a diary, I would be like that sad king of France who recorded '_Rien_' each day." Kate made a practical answer. "We must pack," she said. "But the house--" "Let it stand empty if the owner can't find a tenant. Pay your rent till he does, if that's in the contract. What difference does all that make? Get out where you'll have a chance to recuperate." "Oh, Kate, do you think I ever shall? How does a person recuperate from shame?" "There isn't really any shame to you in what others do," Kate said. "But you--you'll have to go somewhere." "So I shall. Don't worry about me. I shall take good care of myself." Honora looked about her with the face of a spent runner. "I don't see how I'm going to go through with it all," she said, shuddering. So Kate found packers and movers and the breaking-up of the home was begun. It was an ordeal--even a greater ordeal than they had thought it would be. Every one who knew Honora had supposed that she cared more for the laboratory than for her home, but when the packers came and tore the pictures from the walls, it might have been her heart-strings that were severed. Just before the last things were taken out, Kate found her in an agony of weeping on David's bed, which stood with an appalling emptiness beside Honora's. Honora always had wakened first in the morning, Kate knew, and now she guessed at the memories that wrung that great, self-obliterating creature, writhing there under her torment. How often she must have raised herself on her arm and looked over at her man, so handsome, so strong, so completely, as she supposed, her own, and called to him, summoning him to another day's work at the great task they had undertaken for themselves. She had planned to be a wife upon an heroic model, and he had wanted mere blitheness, mere feminine allure. Then, after all, as it turned out, here at hand were all the little qualities, he had desired, like violets hidden beneath their foliage. Kate thought she never had seen anything more feminine than Honora, shivering over the breaking-tip of the linen-closet, where her housewifely stores were kept. "I don't suppose you can understand, dear," she moaned to Kate. "But it's a sort of symbol--a linen-closet is. See, I hemmed all these things with my own hands before I was married, and embroidered the initials!"