“Well, Honey, and how do you and the old lady get on together?” was John’s first question, when, on the evening following their return, and after an absence of many consecutive hours, he found himself alone with his young wife. Poor Honor! What would she not have given to be able to say with a full and grateful heart that John’s mother had been “so good” and “kind” to her? that henceforward she could love the dear “old lady” as though the strongest ties of blood had knitted them together? She would have been so glad, too, to give John pleasure; for well she knew how much, how very much, at heart he had it that she and his mother should, to use his characteristic phraseology, “pull well together.” Poor Honor! poor little well-intentioned Irish maiden! She was sadly, altogether indeed, deficient in moral courage, or in that early stage of her married life she would have done that which might have changed the whole future of her existence; namely, have frankly confessed to John her belief that never, do what she could, and strive with all the powers of both head and heart, could she hope to succeed in softening Mrs. Beacham’s feelings towards her. Against such a course, not only the tenderness, but the harmless, natural vanity of the young wife revolted. It would be hard upon John to be told that his expectations were so very far from being realised, and it would be almost equally hard upon her were she forced to confess that she had so signally failed in making a favourable impression. Honor, I am ashamed to say, had shed more tears on that her first day’s experience of an actual “home” than were either sensible or becoming. Her poor little lip had quivered painfully when Mrs. Beacham, treating her “like company,” had politely refused her assistance in such small household cares as the dusting of dainty china and the “tying down” of bottled gooseberries, both of which tasks were, as Honor thought, quite within her powers skilfully to perform. But it was worse still when, at the early dinner (without John, who was kept away by urgent business connected with the “stock”), her mother-in-law, calling her “Mrs. John” with stately formality, had kept her at arm’s-length in a forbidding manner better imagined than described. In vain she strove by all the simple arts she knew to work her way within the fence that girded the good dame about as though with palisades of iron. She spoke of John--_her_ John--with a large warm-hearted admiration and a meek self-effacing gratitude that might have warmed a heart of stone. But all in vain. Mrs. Beacham evidently considered that laudation of John was an encroachment on her own rights, and, with a snort of dignified displeasure, turned the subject to one more within the province and capacity of the daughter-in-law whom she neither wished nor intended to love. John Beacham little guessed how sore a heart it was that watched so longingly that day for his return. If he thought about Honor at all