Fred Norcott was not the kind of man to be easily repulsed. He did not stand in the slightest awe of John. “A low fellow of a horse-breeder, you know,” is the way he would have described the man whose watchwords were truth and honesty, and whose palm was as pure as a sucking child’s from bribes. “A fellow who ought to be obliged to a gentleman for noticing him, which one wouldn’t do, you know, except for his wife. By Jove! _such_ a pretty creature! Such eyes! and a foot--” But there is no need to follow this unchartered libertine in his (imagined) unseemly rhapsodies. That he did intensely admire the wife of the man he affected to despise had been made quite sufficiently evident during that short colloquy, not only to the object of that admiration, but to honest John himself. The latter was not either of a quarrelsome or a susceptible temperament. It was not in his nature to take umbrage at any respectfully evinced appreciation of his wife’s beauty. Anything so pretty as Honor was of course made to be looked at; but looked at, not with eyes of _convoitise_--not with the bold, much-meaning, purity-tainting stare with which men of the stamp of dissolute Fred Norcott bring burning blushes to the cheeks of girlish beauty. John’s blood had boiled within him when the colour, stirred by the bad man’s gaze, had risen to his fair wife’s brow. He could have felled that slight, delicate-looking libertine to the ground with one blow of his powerful right arm, and the act would have done good, perhaps, to both men; but John had, for the moment at least, his passions under control, and the quondam soldier was left standing scathless upon the greensward, and gazing vacantly at Honor’s retreating figure. The abruptness--not to call it rudeness--with which John Beacham had given him his _congé_ seemed to have produced very little effect in rousing Fred Norcott’s indignation. The impression that the sight of Honor had made upon him was far too powerful for any other emotion either to lessen or to remove it. The fact was that in the Celtic beauty he had traced, or fancied he could trace, one of those extraordinary resemblances which sometimes, in our walk through life--looking back, it may be, along the “wondrous track of dreams”--startle us into retrospective thought. “How like! My G--d! how like!” he said to himself. “The same fair hair, and long dark eyelashes. The same--” “I beg your pardon, Colonel Norcott; but I believe you are thinking of Mrs. John Beacham?” and a middle-aged woman, neatly but plainly dressed, who had approached unperceived (so constant was the hum of voices, and so soft and thick the turf beneath her tread), dropped a curtsey to the gentleman, and begged to say that her name was Bridget Bainbridge.