It was the wrong place for the wrong head certainly; nor did it rest there long. A slight, the very faintest, pressure of the hand that had in all loyalty taken hers, to reassure and strengthen the failing nerves, was sufficient to recall the trembling girl to a sense of the error into which the wild instinct born of alarm had led her. The storm, too, had suddenly abated in violence, the thunder was already dying away in the distance; and Honor, viewing her conduct from a commonsense as well as a commonplace point of view, felt thoroughly ashamed of herself. “I can’t think how I could be so foolish,” she said, with a blush that made her look, Arthur thought, more beautiful than ever. He laughed. He was very anxious to make her feel comfortable as regarded that quite unintentional act of trifling familiarity. “I don’t know what you call foolish, Mrs. Beacham,” he said. “It strikes me that a woman who could stand such a row as that must be a very strong-minded party indeed. I didn’t above half like it myself, and having a lively recollection of the day when I was a small boy--when the big oak in your husband’s meadow was struck with lightning, and a man killed under it--I thought that a wetting was better than that, so I cut along through the rain and--here I am.” He had scarcely finished when another step, a _masterful_ and heavy one, was heard in the passage, and John Beacham, out of breath and wet to the skin (a calamity concerning which, greatly to his mother’s displeasure, he was never known to trouble himself), hurried into the room. After shaking hands heartily with Mr. Vavasour, the master of the house set about accounting for his sudden return and the plight in which he found himself. “I was away at Leigh,” he said, wiping his face and head with a large coloured-silk pocket handkerchief, “when the storm began, and I saw at once it was going to be a sneezer. Says I to myself, ‘The missus won’t like this;’ not that I had any particular reason for thinking so. There’s been no thunderstorm since we knew each other--eh, Honor? But somehow it struck me that you might be frightened, so I told the ostler, though it was raining cats and dogs by that time, to bring out Scrapegrace in a jiffy. Tim thought I was mad, I do believe. You see,” he added with an arch glance at his audience, “he hadn’t a little wife at home to trouble his head about and make an old fool of him. Says he, ‘You’ll be wet through, sir, before you’ve been out five minutes;’ and so, of course, I was. But what did it matter? I never troubled myself about a wet jacket, and Scrapegrace isn’t the boy to be afraid of a flash of lightning, so I threw my leg over the saddle and--here I am.”