This was the sum and substance of Honor’s letter to her husband, and now that it has been very frankly laid before the reader, I greatly fear that his opinion of my poor heroine will not be much raised thereby. Little enough have I to say in her excuse. She was very human, very womanly; with the seeds of corruption in her veins, the child of a weak mother and a wicked father, her infant innocence unshielded by a prayer, the silent nursery work, the holy secret duties which are a mother’s province, and hers only to perform, perforce left undone--how can we wonder then that this child of nature, abandoned to the care of hirelings, and so early transplanted to a soil in many respects uncongenial, should prove herself to be no better than hundreds upon hundreds of her sex and age, who, giving up reality for things hoped for, find to their cost that their foolish discontent has proved their deadliest bane! “Well, John, and what is the letter about? She seems to have written plenty, any way; but I suppose you won’t care to tell _me_ what all that heap of writing is about;” and Mrs. Beacham, who, as was usual with her at letter-delivery time, was busily employed in the housewifely and popular task of concocting strong tea from a not over liberal allowance of the herb, endeavoured to look as if she were not in the slightest degree interested in the queries to which she had just given voice. John, who had just finished his letter, and was proceeding to read it a second time, in order to render himself thoroughly master of its somewhat puzzling contents, pushed the delicate and young-lady-like looking epistle across the table with rather an impatient gesture. “I don’t know that you’ll be able to make much more of a hand of it than I can,” he said gruffly, for his heart felt terribly sore, and with men of John Beacham’s stamp emotion does not manifest itself in an especially tender fashion. “The man hasn’t much the matter with him, as far as I can understand; never had, I daresay,” he added under his breath, but his mother caught the words, and treasured them in her mind for future use.