Lifting his hat gravely from his fair curls (a luxuriant crop of waving hair was the solitary beauty which he had inherited from his dead father), Horace Vavasour said, with a mingled stiffness and urbanity, worthy of the future “public man:” “I believe that I have the honour of speaking to Mrs. John Beacham?” On hearing this semi-interrogation, Miss Sophy Duberly, young lady of the world though she was, made a slight, though very perceptible, start of surprise. Although, woman-like, she had kept the feeling closely concealed within the impregnable fastnesses of her own breast, this young heiress had nevertheless experienced some of the jealous pangs which female flesh is heir to, on becoming acquainted--in a partial degree--with her lover’s frequent visits to John Beacham’s farm. That she, an heiress, and, consequent on that favoured condition, a petted beauty, should really be slighted for the farmer’s wife, or indeed for any wife, was an idea that never entered simple little Sophy Duberly’s head; but there nevertheless was a soreness--if anyone had dared to call the feeling by the ugly name of jealousy she would have repelled the charge indignantly--about that spot in the young girl’s memory, which was connected with that beautiful Honor Beacham, and therefore it was that she had not been able to repress that foolish little start, which would have betrayed to any keen observer a mind not entirely at ease. But although this was so, the kind feeling of the indulged heiress towards a person so unmistakably her inferior (as the warehouseman’s daughter, amiable though she was, believed Honor to be) induced the bride-elect to attempt a task, in which, however, nature had been beforehand with her--the task, that is to say, of preventing Mrs. John Beacham from either looking or feeling, under these exceptional circumstances, awkward or ill at ease.