and “as a friend” he deemed it his duty to impart to her the fact of his approaching marriage, and that he must, before many days would be past over, bid adieu to Gillingham. She was in the garden that afternoon, and they (Honor and her friend) were standing together side by side on the famous terrace, when the latter said abruptly: “Before I see you again, Mrs. Beacham, how many things will have changed! I shall be a married man--how absurd it sounds!--tied and bound by the chain of a wife!” and he laughed nervously as he said the word. Honor, feeling rather confused, contrived to murmur something about not exactly seeing the absurdity of the measure proposed. It _might_ be entertaining, certainly, but she did not understand why Mr. Vavasour laughed. “Well, I suppose I didn’t mean precisely absurd, but unsatisfactory somehow--startling almost at my age, you know--to be bothered by a wife.” Honor’s sense of the ridiculous was struck by the word “startling,” and she laughed; such a musical laugh it was! Arthur thought she never looked so pretty as when she was amused. “I suppose you have been warned in time?” she said; “it hasn’t taken you entirely by surprise that there exists a young lady whose lot it is to be Mrs. Arthur Vavasour.” His quick eye glanced at her for a moment. Was there a shade, the slightest in the world, of _pique_ in her words and tone? He could not say. Honor was not in the least prone to sarcasm, but her manner had a little taken him by surprise, and he answered hesitatingly: “Warned! yes, of course I was warned--warned by my own follies, my own actual idiotcy, that I must do something of the sort. I suppose you know all about it--all that the world reports, at least. How that--I know one oughtn’t to say such things, but you are so safe--that there isn’t much love in the matter. Old Duberly is as rich as a Jew--” Honor opened wide the eyes of astonishment and consternation. “Rich! yes, I know he is rich; but what is that to you--you, with all that money, that beautiful place? O, Mr. Vavasour, you never can be going to marry because the lady is rich! Think how dreadful not to love her! And people say, too, that Miss Duberly is young and pretty. Ah!” she continued musingly, “I know now what Mrs. Beacham must have meant when she said something of the kind; but I never, never would have believed it, unless you had told me so yourself.” “Then don’t believe it now,” he said, drawing a step nearer, for he was touched and gratified by her implied compliment to the disinterestedness of his character and motives. “It is quite out of my line, I hope, to do anything of the kind. But, you see, fathers are different from sons--_they_ look forward, which we don’t; and besides, I quite well remember mine saying to me once that he considered it rather a misfortune than otherwise for a man to be in love with the girl he was going to marry.”