Honor made what haste she could, gathering together her full skirts to save them as best she might from the dusty wheel, and feeling, she scarcely knew why, a something in her husband’s tone that jarred against her sense of what was delicate and becoming; jarred too against her own consciousness of beauty, of being well-dressed; of being, in short, a little woman worthy to be petted and admired. She was not cross--far from it--as she shook out her ample drapery and took John’s sturdy arm, while Mrs. Beacham held firm possession of the other; but, though not the least angry with her husband, Honor was too habitually good-tempered, and, at the moment too happy, to be _that_, she was perhaps rather more disposed than she had been before to greet with satisfaction any appreciating words or flattering attentions which might chance to fall to her lot. Nor were such opportunities for the gratification of a vanity which was more natural than harmless, likely to be wanting. Honor’s beauty was not of the kind to be passed over in a crowd, be that crowd ever so dense or individually preoccupied. The exquisite colouring, delicate as it was rich, of her bright young face--the lips slightly parted, red and dewy--and the violet eyes, half-shy, half-laughing, made up a _tout ensemble_ that many a man turned and turned again to look upon, as Honor Beacham flitted amongst the throng that day, leaning on her husband’s arm. CHAPTER XXII. A TOUCH OF THE SPUR. Many gentlemen, as I have just said--gentlemen, that is, by brevet and by prescriptive right--made themselves conspicuous that day by their open and undisguised admiration for John Beacham’s beautiful wife. Honor was, unfortunately, precisely in the position which of all others renders a young woman the most easy to be beset by this indelicate description of flattery. There is something in the very name of a “horse-breeder’s wife” which at once connects itself in the mind with what is as “fast” and “slangy” and forward as the most fast and free and horsey among the “fine young English ladies” of our day. Those who chanced to know Honor personally might have proclaimed the contrary; but somehow young men in general do not care much to assert that a beautiful girl with whom they are acquainted has betrayed the reverse of the proclivities above alluded to; so, for lack of a champion, those who were not acquainted with Mrs. John Beacham judged of that young woman as it pleased them best. Amongst the class of “gentlemen” above alluded to--_messieurs qui suivent les femmes_ from rule, from habit, and from inclination--the one that stared the most at, and followed the closest on, Honor’s footsteps was the individual with whom the reader has already made some slight acquaintance in his character of owner of that celebrated yearling yclept Rough Diamond.