“I heard you were expected, Mrs. Beacham,” he said, and the slow lingering pressure of his hand, sent, as he intended that it should, a thrill through Honor’s delicate frame. “How long it is since we have met!” “Very long,” Honor contrived to say; and then addressing her father, she said something that was not very coherent about her pleasure in seeing him so much recovered from his recent illness. “Well, yes, I am better,” he said carelessly. “It wasn’t much besides a cold; but women are so easily frightened: Mrs. Norcott thought I was going to die, I believe, when she wrote, and was glad enough when your husband--by the bye, what an uncommon good fellow he must be!--allowed you to come and nurse me. _Nurse_ me? You will laugh at that. I don’t look much like an invalid, do I?” “No, indeed!” Honor said, with the pretty laugh, “restrained by gracefulness,” and yet which was so thoroughly Hibernian in its character; “I didn’t think, any more than John did, that you’d be up and about.” “I daresay not; but I really was most uncommonly seedy for a week or so--ask Mrs. N. if I wasn’t; fever at night, and all that kind of thing.” “Fever? I believe you!” responded his wife, who had been keeping up a not very well-sustained conversation with Arthur Vavasour; but who, like a true wife, was ready to endorse any and everything that fell from her husband’s lips. “You haven’t an idea how ill the Colonel has been. I declare, the day I wrote to you, Honor--I’m going to call her Honor, Colonel, from this out--I was that frightened, I didn’t know which way to turn. Says I, surely his friends ought to know--and then I thought of you; says I--” But Colonel Norcott cut short all further reminiscence by a laugh.