“It’s lonely without you, my dear,” he said more than once, standing with Honor in the summer twilight among the hollyhocks and scarlet-runners, in the old-fashioned inn-garden. “It’s very lonely, especially in the evenings; you know I’m not much of a reader, and I get very tired of the old lady’s knitting-needles--click, click, click! by the hour together. O, Honor, it will be very pleasant, dear, when you come home again!” And Honor thought so too; at least, she comforted John by saying something of the kind, sending that honest farmer home with a lightened heart because of the awakened hope within him that very soon his wife would be again under the shelter of his roof. “She’ll be here to-morrow, mother, or at farthest next day,” he said cheerily to the old lady on his return home, after the ninth day of Honor’s absence. “The Colonel is going on all right, thank God! Ah, mother, if you only knew what a relief that is! I never speak to Honor about what passed. I couldn’t well, seeing that he’s her father, worse luck! But I can tell you that I never slept--no, not a wink, that I can safely say--till he was out of danger; and what would have become of me, if so be he’d died, the Lord in heaven only knows!” Mrs. Beacham laid down her knitting-needles, and looked at her son with eyes full of loving pity. Her nature seemed to have undergone a change since the eventful day of the Danescourt discovery. The mere fact of being once more alone as of yore, with John, had a softening effect, not only on her feelings towards him, but towards Honor. Her manner of speaking, therefore, towards her daughter-in-law was far more pleasant and tolerant than usual. “It’s been a sore trial, John, I’m sure of that,” she said; “but Honor won’t be the one, I’m sure, not to forget and forgive.” “Forget and forgive!” John repeated warmly. “Why, in Heaven’s name, what or who has she got, I should like to know, to forget and to forgive? Is it the man who behaved like a brute and a scoundrel to the poor soul her mother, or is it me, that gave him only what he deserved, the villain, that Honor’s to be forgetting and forgiving?” Poor Mrs. Beacham, completely taken aback by this unexpected outburst, could, in the impossibility of excusing herself, only resume her knitting in dignified silence. She had not the remotest idea how she had offended John--John, whom she had never in her life before known to be so cranky. If he could not talk to Honor about the “crack” on the head that he had given her “papa,” why, surely, that was as much as to say she had a right to be offended. So argued to herself this sensible old lady; nor were her reasonings, all things considered, entirely without their modicum of common sense.