“No, no, in course you couldn’t; I allow that. And now, having been forced, as it were--which I didn’t want to--to say all this, all I have to ask is that you’ll just hold your tongue about the matter. I’ve always kep a good deal out of her way, poor little thing, because I didn’t want to be questioned either by her or by anyone else; she has heard I’m her aunt, and that’s pretty well all. While as for John--though to be sure, Honor’s pretty enough, God bless her! to make a man bear anything for her sake--yet it’s my opinion he’s just the sort not to be best pleased when he found out that his wife wasn’t an honest woman’s daughter. As for the old lady, I wouldn’t be in Honor’s shoes (from all I hear) for a good deal, if the truth came out in her hearing.” The Colonel was silent for a few minutes, and while unconsciously cutting with his cane the tall fragrant blossoms of the “meadow sweet” that grew beside the path, he thought with his usual astuteness and rapidity on the reasons for and against his following the widow’s advice. On the whole--and he came to the conclusion far more quickly than would have been the case with nine out of ten of his sex who had chanced to be similarly situated--on the whole, he decided that it would probably _pay_ better to (_judiciously_, of course) allow his relationship to Honor to transpire. She was wonderfully pretty, and--but we need not follow this man through the network of reasoning, or rather through the tortuous underground plotting of his subtle mind. For all that he came of gentle blood, and had been reared under the roof of an “honourable” father, Frederick Norcott was, or rather had become, one of “the creeping things innumerable” which, among “both the small and great beasts” of mortality, do everywhere abound. He had lived too long upon his “wits” not to keep those weapons sharp, and to the last degree serviceable; a man he was, thoroughly confident in the inexhaustibleness of his own mental resources; for he had too often during the course of his _oiseau sur la branche_ existence had to trust exclusively to those purveying talents of his, not to appreciate those useful gifts at their full value. He owed them a deep debt of gratitude for the good service they had done him in the mixed society of the New World, where he had been so fortunate as to hit the fancy of the “nice person” now raised to the state and dignity of--as she herself termed it--Mrs. _Colonel_ Norcott, and who, though her grandfather had laid the foundation of his large fortune in a not over creditable manner, was possessed of as many hundreds per annum as would enable Fred to begin the world afresh.