“I haven’t offended you?” he said, looking anxiously at her half-averted face. “I thought we were friends; I am sorry, so sorry, if I have vexed you, but you _must_ forgive me. It is so difficult, so impossible, to see much of anyone--I mean anyone like you--without--without becoming stupidly confidential; and I could not--indeed I could not--help telling you how I had missed you when I was away. You see, I am so strangely situated, so--” He stopped; it was such dangerous ground that on which he had begun to tread: he on the very verge of matrimony; and, as it appeared on the face of things, so entirely guided to that verge by his own wishes and inclinations. Honor looked up at him in surprise. “You are going to be married,” she said coldly. “You told me so yourself, and I have seen the young lady that is to be your wife. She is rich and pretty, and looks nice and kind. Why do you say that you are strangely situated?” “Why,” said Arthur impetuously, “because I should never, no, not for one single moment, have dreamt of marrying Miss Duberly if I had not been driven to it by--but,” he went on with a hard bitter laugh, “it sounds too ridiculous to say by what. You would not believe now, Mrs. Beacham--you, who know so little of the world, and of what is called _business_, and of human nature--that I, whom people in general think so much to be envied, ‘heir to such a splendid property’--young, prosperous, everything that is most delightful--should be--don’t laugh if you can help it--marrying for money.” Again she looked at him, but this time with eyes full of pity and distress. “How strange!” she said softly. “No, indeed, I never should have thought that; I always believed--I always fancied--” “That I was one of those jolly fellows that can do what they like, and have everything their own way. How wonderfully you, and everyone else are mistaken! I should just like--no, I shouldn’t, it would be such a bitter shame--to have the whole business shown up. I know I must seem such an awful screw sometimes, such a confounded cur! People must wonder why I don’t subscribe to charities and asylums, and to the hounds; and, now--why I marry this girl,--this heiress, who,” he continued as if talking to himself, “is no connection, has no beauty; while I--well, in the common course of nature, may expect to live a few years longer--to a rational age that is--for what is called ‘settling down.’ The truth is”--and here he lowered his voice, although there was no one within hearing, to a whisper--“the truth is, that I have no inclination, no ‘call,’ as they say, to marry. If Miss Duberly were the most beautiful creature that ever breathed, I should feel the same. It is now three months since I engaged myself to Sophy Duberly, and since then”--with a glance full of meaning at his companion--“I have had time to discover that on her account, as well as my own, I have made a grievous and fatal mistake.”