He was blind with passion, and half maddened by a sense of the dire disgrace that had fallen upon the wife of whom he was both so proud and fond. The object, however, of that tremendous vituperation was not one to accept so bitter an affront with calmness. Though slight in appearance, he possessed considerable muscular power, and, like many of his sex, the sense of being endowed with personal vigour above the average lent the impulse to revenge himself for personal indignity with a blow. Already his hand, clenched and rigid, was raised to strike the man of low degree, who had so insolently abused and braved him, when John Beacham, whose blood was at boiling-point, seeing the action, quicker than thought intercepted the blow, and with his thick ash-stick hit his adversary a blow upon the head that would have felled an ox. The man--Honor’s father (John thought of _that_ when it was too late)--sank to the ground, as if he had been shot through the brain, and lay there--it was an awful sight to his assailant--without sense or motion. In a moment, every angry feeling hushed, and with a terrible dread at his heart that he had done a deed never in the course of the longest life to be repaired, John bent over the man whom he had so lately despised and hated, and laying his hand upon the breast of the unconscious profligate, sought anxiously if any precious signs of life were yet remaining there. To John Beacham--a man tender-hearted in his softer moments as a woman--to one who, like the good-natured, simple-hearted farmer, had gone through life at peace with all men, and with a conscience void of offence towards God and towards his neighbour, it was no light thing the sight of that apparently lifeless form lying prone upon the greensward, stretched there--killed, perhaps--by _his_ impetuous hand! Pale as a corpse he lay there--that well-dressed, overbearing London gentleman, who so lately--God forgive him!--had boasted of his besetting sin. His fair hair--it was the colour of Honor’s, and the thought that it was so flashed through John Beacham’s mind even in that, to him, unparalleled moment of horror and suspense--his fair hair, which made him ever appear so much younger than his years, lay dank and wet over his cheek, and was matted down over the left temple by the life-blood that was slowly oozing through a ghastly wound. At the sight, all poor John’s presence of mind deserted him. He lived in peaceable times, and in a peaceable parish, so that his experience of such ugly gashes was extremely limited. In Colonel Norcott’s livid colour and in that sluggishly dripping purple gore he read, as it were, a sentence of death, and his blood ran cold at the sight. “Dead! My God!” he exclaimed frantically; “and I, Heaven forgive me! have killed him!” With a vague instinct, desperate as seemed the case, of seeking aid, he was rushing away from the fatal spot, when a groan from the wounded man arrested his steps.