“Nonsense! home again!” the Colonel said in his pleasant, cheerful way; “as if such things were to be allowed! Now we’ve got you here, young lady,” and he patted his daughter’s cheek affectionately, “here we mean to keep you. And if this John of yours says a word, why we’ll have him up too, and give him a taste of London life, which he’ll be the better of.--But I say, Arthur, where are you going to, old fellow? To dine _tête-à-tête_ with the missis, eh? We’re so far from civilised life in these confounded diggings, that I suppose it wouldn’t pay taking pot-luck in this shanty of ours; otherwise, you’re as welcome to what we’ve got as flowers in May.” “Thank you, I should like nothing better,” Arthur said, his eyes, which were fixed admiringly on Honor, giving ample corroboration of his words; “but there’s a great spread--an awful bore it will be--at old Duberly’s; and then we have to go to something at Lady Guernsey’s--a drum, I believe, they call it--a sort of affair where you get stewed to rags, and pressed like beef-à-la-mode, or some horrid thing of that kind, afterwards.” Of course they all laughed as they said good-bye to him. Honor was especially cheerful on the occasion. Especially cheerful, because her heart was at the moment sinking so heavily within her. Sinking from an undefined and yet miserable sense that all she saw and heard was wrong. Wrong on Colonel Norcott’s side, inasmuch as not only he, but his wife, had, as was almost clear even to Honor’s unsuspicious mind, been in league together to deceive her--wrong on her own because it was patent to herself that the deception excited in her mind neither anger nor regret. But feeling, as she did, both depressed and frightened at her novel position, Honor summoned one of her brightest smiles to her lip as her hand lay for a moment within Arthur’s. Colonel Norcott followed him to the head of the staircase, and after a short whispered conversation, returned to the drawing-room. He looked harassed and annoyed; and, now that the forced smiles and pleasant look had left his face, Honor could plainly see the marks that age and care had left there. “Gad, it’s late,” he said, looking at his watch; and then Mrs. Norcott, in obedience to a private signal from her husband, asked Honor if she would not like to see her room. “It’s a good way up,” she said, as they mounted the steep narrow stairs peculiar to the upper flights of modern-built houses of the calibre of No. 14 Stanwick-street. “The Colonel, of course, does not attempt it; but for young legs like yours and mine it’s a mere nothing.”