“Dear old mother,” he said cheerily, “as if I didn’t know all that! You’ve been everything to me, God knows, and I should be a brute if I could forget it; but, mammy,” he went on coaxingly, and with a scarcely conscious use of the old and half-forgotten name which was hers in the long-past days of his troublesome boyhood, “you must remember that I am getting on; and if I’m ever to think about finding a wife at all, it’s time I set about it. Besides, there’s Honor, who--” “Why, John, she’s Irish!” broke in the old lady, in a tone well calculated to convey the impression that she, at least, considered Miss Blake’s birthplace as an insuperable bar to any closer connection with himself. “She’s Irish, which is bad enough of itself, dear knows, without it’s being said of her, as it is said, which well you know, John, that she’s a young woman as hasn’t friends. In my time, which they say everything’s changed now, and more’s the pity--if folks was respectable they’d friends of some sort or another to show, which this Miss Blake seemingly has not; and, John,” lowering her voice to a whisper, although they were far enough removed from human ears, she and John in fact being the only two persons still up and about in the old house, “John, do you know, between ourselves, I shouldn’t wonder, that I shouldn’t, if the girl was to turn out to be a love-child!” John was silent for a moment, being in fact utterly at a loss how best to reply to these decidedly unpleasant suggestions. He had himself--but that was prior to the time when he had become so blindly and irrevocably in love--he had himself felt some misgivings, in addition to some little curiosity, regarding Honor Blake’s birth and parentage. Not, as he had since taught himself to think, that the matter was one of primary importance. To be sure, if he _had_ a rather strong prejudice regarding such things, it was in favour of legitimate birth. He certainly would not be exactly gratified by the tardy discovery that his dearly beloved Honor was a “love-child;” but then, on the other hand, if his bride did chance to be that reprobated being, a friendless girl, why there was comfort after all to be picked out of _that_. Having no near and acknowledged kinsfolk of her own, she would be the more likely to devote herself exclusively to her husband; and it was this comforting reflection which enabled him to respond with tolerable boldness to Mrs. Beacham’s hypothesis. “As to Honor’s being Irish, mother, I don’t think that matters much one way or the other. There’s good and bad in all countries, and in my opinion she’s as much too good for me, even if she was to turn out what you call a ‘love-child,’ as she is too young and too pretty.” “Too good!” retorted the old woman angrily; “I should just like to hear anybody else say such a word as that! I’d pretty soon show ’em what I thought of their opinion!”