John, who was good-nature itself, and very ready to believe himself in the wrong, was a little moved by Colonel Norcott’s half-reproachful tone. After all the man _might_ mean well, improbable as it seemed; anyway, and for Honor’s sake, it might be as well to listen to what he had to say. He reopened negotiations, therefore, with an apology: “I beg your pardon, Colonel Norcott,” he said; “it was not my intention to offend. As for my wife’s relations, she hasn’t many that I know of, any more than I have myself; but”--and here he remembered certain expressed longings on the part of Honor to learn something of her _dead_ parents, which prompted him to add--“but I don’t say that I wouldn’t--more for her sake than my own--like to gather some particulars about her friends. She’s an orphan, that we know, but--” “But supposing she wasn’t an orphan,” put in Norcott, looking his auditor fixedly in the face; “supposing she had a father alive; and supposing that her father was a gentleman--a man who--Well, come now, I’ll tell you the story in a few words, and you may make what you can of it. Some eighteen or nineteen years ago--gad, how time flies!--a young fellow with eyes in his head, and a heart, as the poets say, in his ‘buzzom,’ was quartered for his sins in a country town in that blessed country Ireland. There was nothing earthly for him to do; no society, or anything of the kind. As for hunting, that wasn’t to be had for love or money; and, to make matters worse, there was rain, rain--rain from morning till night. Now I leave it to you, as a sensible man, to say what, under heaven, in such a case was to be done, and whether it isn’t your opinion that, all things considered, it wasn’t a lucky thing for the poor young fellow when he contrived to fall in love?” John Beacham, feeling called on to make some reply, muttered something to the effect that, being placed in so unfortunate a position, it was perhaps just as well that the gentleman in question should have lighted on his legs in so providential a manner. Whereupon Colonel Fred, apparently satisfied with the rejoinder, continued swimmingly the thread of his discourse: “The girl he got spoony on was devilish handsome; fair, with large blue eyes; the kind of beauty you hear about a good deal oftener in an Irish ‘countryman’s’ house than you have the good fortune to see. She’d a grand figure too, and, if she had ever worn stays, which of course she hadn’t--they never do in those diggings--Miss Winifred Moriarty would have been something worth looking at, by Jove!” “And that was Honor’s mother?” John said, very sadly, and as though talking to himself; for already over his young wife’s birth there seemed to fall the shadow of a great shame, and the proud lowly-born man--prouder than many of the exalted ones of the earth, who too often take such matters as affairs of course--shrunk away, as does a wounded man from the sharp touch of the surgeon’s probe.