These lamentations and prognostics, when they reached the ears of Mrs. Beacham, were met not only with ridicule, but with an indignant protest. “What could they, a set of ignorant busybodies, know of what was passing in the mind of a sensible man like John? She had no patience, not she, with that everlasting talk about getting married, putting thoughts into young men’s heads that wouldn’t be there without, and interfering in a way that no decent person ought to do with other people’s sons. If John meant to marry he would, and if he didn’t why he wouldn’t, and that was all about it; and for her part, she just wished that everybody would leave him alone and mind their own business.” At length, and by the time that Mrs. Beacham had almost, if not quite, ceased to think of her son as a possibly marrying man, he--the hitherto practical and prudent bachelor--began to manifest certain symptoms, which, but for the sense of security into which she had rocked herself, could scarcely have failed to awaken the spirit of suspicion in the old lady’s breast. It was again owing to the hints of her neighbours, and the more outspoken words of that agreeable gossip the widow Thwaytes, that certain eccentricities perpetrated by her son reached his mother’s ears. Among the most suggestive of these eccentricities was the purchase in London of a “booky” of hothouse flowers, and the driving of his big black horse “like mad” to Clay’s Farm, in order that the gardenias and the Cape jasmines might be fresh and sweet when they met the eyes of pretty Honor Blake. At first, Mrs. Beacham positively declined to entertain the idea that at his time of life John would be that foolish as to be made an idiot of by a “gel.” As long as blindness to her son’s weakness was possible, she shut her eyes resolutely to facts, and refused to believe even the evidence of her senses. The neighbours might, and indeed at this interesting crisis they _did_, come about her daily like bees, buzzing restlessly about the tempting honey-pot, in which was silently fermenting a domestic event, in the boiling-point of which all felt themselves to be more or less intimately concerned; but busy though they were, and curious, as well as tolerably well informed withal, his mother, trusting to John’s good sense, and being herself either ignorant or forgetful of the power of the tender passion, remained tranquil in her fancied security.