She would not write--so Honor, with very little hesitation, decided--to inform John Beacham that her father was well in health, and that her longer stay in London was uncalled for. It was wonderful, whilst acting thus, how many specious arguments she made use of to persuade herself that she was less guilty than she seemed. No one could imagine--so she told herself (sitting before the small painted mirror, with her fair hair hanging loosely about her neck and shoulders)--no one could by any possibility imagine that she _could_ be there for her own pleasure. Such a wretched room as they had given her! Room, indeed! Would anyone in his or her senses at Peartree-house have called that closet of a place by such an inappropriate name? And then her father, though his bodily health was acknowledged to be satisfactory, yet betrayed, in Honor’s opinion, evident symptoms of a mind ill at ease at least, if not diseased. His pecuniary affairs, too, struck his inexperienced daughter as being in no flourishing condition. The smallness and _mesquinerie_ of the house (a part of which only was occupied by her relations); the absence of a man-servant--for Honor had picked up a good deal of the knowledge of “life” from the pages of three-volume novels; to say nothing of the dress, cheap though showy, of her hostess, betrayed to Honor the fact that either money was far less plentiful in her father’s than her husband’s home, or that penuriousness was a vice indulged in to a large extent among her newly-found connections. “If my father were rich and prosperous,” she said to herself--and, to do her only justice, this ingenious though unconscious sophist firmly believed in the honesty of her excuses--“if my father were rich and prosperous, I should act differently, and write at once to tell John he is well. I should mind in that case less, I think, the making him have a still worse opinion of my poor father than I know he has at present. If I could hope that John would make excuses for them, I should know better what to do; but he would be simply furious. I know that he would never have let me come, if he had not believed that my father was suffering from the effects of that horrid blow; and perhaps, after all, he _was;_ and besides, if he did make the worst of his illness for the purpose of having me with him, where was the mighty harm? It only shows that my poor father loves me,” added Honor, sadly, to the wilful tender little heart, which was, alas, so likely to be led astray by its own warm womanly impulses.