“How good you are to me! I shall love you very dearly--better than anybody; and if my father lives, I think I shall be happier, far happier, than I have ever been before.” Mrs. Baker was too much engrossed with anxiety for her son’s health, and with the thought of his approaching interview with Honor, to take much notice of the latter’s slightly incongruous speech; incongruous, as proceeding from the lips of a bride little more than three months old, and whose apparent prospects in life were all that was bright and encouraging. If, however, the idea struck her that there was perchance a skeleton in the young wife’s closet, and that all things with her were not what they seemed, the prudent old lady forbore making any inquiry, direct or indirect, into the causes not only of Mrs. John Beacham’s burst of grateful sentiment, but of the implied doubt thrown by that impulsive effusion upon the happiness of her home. The time, too, which Mrs. Baker had allowed herself for this trying conversation had more than expired; so, after a long and silent embrace, the two women rose, and without further preparation on either side walked slowly together--arm linked in arm, and one, the younger, feeling very nervous, and not a little bewildered by her novel position--into Colonel Norcott’s room. Honor was not much accustomed to the sight of serious illness, so that the first glimpse which she caught of her father’s face--disfigured as it was by the blotches of fever, and surmounted by a linen bandage--filled her with dismay. He was moaning wearily, and evidently wandering in his mind. No revelations of tangible meaning flowed, (and experience tells us that such secrets seldom are divulged by the delirious) from the parched lips of Frederick Norcott. He was (in spirit) miles upon miles, and years upon years, away from that silent bedroom where two women, one old and the other young, watched him with anxious care. Away to the haunts of his giddy desperate youth--away to the scenes in which his living had been devoured--away to the distant lands where, till the wheel of Fortune turned for him, he was well-nigh compelled to fill (figuratively speaking, of course) his belly with the husks which the swine did eat. For two hours and upwards he lay there tossing restlessly from side to side, muttering incoherent sentences, and causing Honor more than once as she bathed his fevered forehead, or held the cooling medicine to his lips, to blush crimson for the only half-comprehended vileness of her perhaps dying parent. At the end of those two hours a message--very softly delivered--came to Honor, with a request from her husband to know what she was going to do. Would Mrs. John Beacham come out into the passage and speak to him? John asked; and thus entreated, Honor stole out on tiptoe to meet the kind-hearted man who had in his feverish anxiety almost counted the moments of her absence from his side. CHAPTER XI. HONOR SHOWS A LIKING FOR THE “BELL.”