In the mean time honest John Beacham, the man whose life had hitherto been so uneventful, whose experience of the exciting scenes that to some are as the very breath of life was so wonderfully limited, was about as miserable as it is possible for a healthy, strong-nerved, unsentimental man to feel. There was a vague sensation (_only_ vague, thank God for that!) within him that a wall of separation was being raised between him and the young wife who, for the first time, had interests separate from his. He was a man not prone to the anticipation of misfortune. The fear of having fallen upon evil days was one that he would in his matter-of-fact simplicity have been very far from hugging to his heart, with the morbid clinging of the _tête montée_ and the imaginative. But though a sensible man, and a cheerfully disposed, the shadow of a coming change was cast before his path; and John Beacham, leaning his head upon his hand, gazed vacantly into the inn-yard, where busy ostlers and ubiquitous stablemen were fulfilling the noisy, swearing, slopping ends of their several beings, and thought, more gloomily than in his life he had ever done before, upon the future. What, he asked himself, if his mother’s boding prophecy should come true? What if Frederick Norcott were indeed to die, and the blood of the man whom he had slain should be required at his hands? That, in case of the Colonel’s death and his own inculpation, any extreme or heavy penalty would be inflicted on himself, John was too well versed in the laws and common sense of the land to think probable; but there was another punishment--a punishment from which neither human laws nor even the sense of a powerful press can avail to save the guilty--and that punishment is the sting, poisonous as an asp’s, and more stinging than the cruellest serpent’s--the sting, that is, of an accusing conscience. Well did poor John Beacham know that, should Honor’s father die of that foul blow that _he_ had dealt him, the memory of that day’s work would haunt his spirit, both in his waking and his sleeping moments, both in his goings out and his comings in, whilst life should last; while as for _her_--as for the woman in whom his all of happiness here below was centred--if she should turn her bright face from him; if she, looking upon him as her father’s murderer, should no more be the light and blessing of his home; if--But the unhappy man could pursue the terrible picture no farther. With a groan, involuntarily uttered in his deep anguish, but which startled his mother from a refreshing nap, John’s honest head fell forward in his clasped hands, and tears (the first that he had shed since he was a boy) oozed slowly through his fingers. CHAPTER IX. HONOR FINDS A NEW RELATION.