Honor sat down on the edge of her narrow iron bedstead, and felt for the moment like one dazed. All that during the last hour had occurred was so widely different from her previous imaginings. Where was the sick-room, the wasted invalid, the atmosphere of physic-bottles and of gloom? Instead, had she not been received with chaff and cheerfulness? Was not her father in apparently perfect health? And already, simultaneously almost with her arrival, had not a visitor appeared, an intimacy with whom her conscience warned her had better be avoided, and regarding whom, as she was well aware, her mother-in-law had already thrown out hints as uncalled for as they were offensive? And then, closely following on these mental communings, there came the more searching questions of, “What would John think of all this mean deceit? Would he not, in his indignation at the trick, instantaneously require her return?” Instantaneously? Yes! Honor felt well assured of that; John Beacham was the last man in the world to suffer patiently such a deception as had been practised upon him. He hated--of that too his wife was well aware--the man who had deceived him, with as much of rancorous feeling as he was capable of entertaining; and therefore any further sojourn on her part under her father’s roof would, were John to become cognisant of the truth, have been indignantly protested against. But, on the other hand, Honor herself, though aware that she had been lured under a false presence to Stanwick-street, was by no means disposed to disclose this fact to one so deeply interested as was John in all that so nearly concerned her safety and well-being. She was conscious, on the contrary, of a very decided inclination to remain, for the present at least, where she was. Of course this inclination--the mere passing of the desire through her heart, to say nothing of the yielding to it--was wrong, selfish, and unwifely to the most unpardonable extent. Honor, too, was well aware that she was guilty in not driving from her, at the very first onslaught, the tempter who assailed her. There was little excuse, save in the weakness of our most imperfect human nature, for the taking of this first dearly-bought step in wrong. It cost but little trouble putting that wrong foot foremost. She had but to be passive, nothing could be easier, and the affair, one might almost say, righted itself. But facile as it all had seemed, and scarcely out of the common order of things, the time came when that poor weak woman would have given all of life that remained to her, could she have, by so doing, annulled the decision of a moment, and thus averted all the terrible consequences that followed thereupon.