She had never accompanied him on these trips; she instinctively divined a man's desire for a ramble among old haunts with old friends, freed for a brief space from the happy burdens of domesticity.
The lodge on the Sagamore was now her shrine; there she would rest and think of him, follow his footsteps to his best-loved haunts, wander along the rivers where he had wandered, dream by the streams where he had dreamed.
She had married her husband out of awe, sheer awe for his wonderful personality. And he was wonderful; faultless in everything--though not so faultless as to be in bad taste, she often told herself. His _entourage_ also was faultless; and the general faultlessness of everything had made her married life very perfect.
As she sat thinking in the darkened music-room, something stirred in the hallway outside. She raised her eyes; the white bull-terrier stood in the lighted doorway, looking in at her.
A perfectly incomprehensible and resistless rush of loneliness swept her to her feet; in a moment she was down on the floor again, on her silken knees, her arms around the dog, her head pressed tightly to his head.
"Oh," she said, choking, "I must go to-morrow--I must--I must.... And here are the violets; ... I will tie them to your collar.... Hold still!... He loves you; ... but you shall not have them--do you hear?... No, no, ... for I shall wear them, ... for I like their odor; ... and, anyway, ... I am going away."...
The next day she began her pilgrimage; and His Highness went with her; and a maid from the British Isles.
She had telegraphed to the Sagamore Club for rooms, to make sure, but that was unnecessary, because there were at the moment only three members of the club at the lodge.
Now although she herself could scarcely be considered a member of the Sagamore Angling Club, she still controlled her husband's shares in the concern, and she was duly and impressively welcomed by the steward. Two of the three members domiciled there came up to pay their respects when she alighted from the muddy buckboard sent to the railway to meet her; they were her husband's old friends, Colonel Hyssop and Major Brent, white-haired, purple-faced, well-groomed gentlemen in the early fifties. The third member was out in the rain fishing somewhere down-stream.