theatres to learn all sorts of wickedness, why, he and Honor had better come to an understanding. It was an awful threat, certainly, but one which, perhaps unfortunately for Honor, was never carried into execution. I say unfortunately, for at that time a little _stir_, even the commonplace stir of an actual scolding, would have done Honor good. She was suffering from the natural consequences of reaction after an excitement which had told heavily on her nervous system. Now, neither John nor his mother understood anything about nerves. They had heard of such things, to be sure, but they had about as much faith in their actual existence as they had in that of the king of the cannibals, or the great sea-serpent himself. Had Honor, however, been questioned on the subject of her _malaise_, she would have found it no easy matter to account for her sensations. She felt wearied, listless, and depressed. There was no actual wearying in her mind for change, and yet there was within her a latent conviction that _only_ in change would she find comfort and improvement. How heavily hung at that trying period of this young woman’s life the time that God had given her to improve, she alone could tell. If _they_--her husband and her husband’s mother--would only have talked to her about the late transactions, all might have been better. There are seasons when there is a positive craving after conversation on _self_--a craving which is in itself a token of an unhealthy and morbid condition of mind; and Honor Beacham, seated dejectedly at her work during those long summer evenings--evenings whose silence oppressed her like the lowering of a heavy thunder-cloud--would have been thankful for any discussion that might break the dull monotony of that weary time. If Honor believed that lack of interest in her concerns was at the bottom of this reserve, she was greatly mistaken. She would, perhaps, have found it hard to imagine that an innate delicacy was the cause of this singular _retenue;_ yet so in fact it was. On John Beacham’s side especially, there existed a very natural shrinking from to any allusion to the past. The blow struck by him in a moment of wild and unpardonable passion was ever present to him as an offence alike against the laws of God and the enactments of man. Had Honor not been, unfortunately, deeply interested in the victim of his ungovernable fury, John would still have felt considerable repugnance to speaking of the man whom he had wounded. But things standing as they were, and, above all, with Honor looking so changed, so quiet, so _grand_, as Mrs. Beacham was once heard to say of her, what wonder that honest John, far from coming to what he called an “understanding” with the wife of his bosom, should, by his hourly-increasing reserve, have opened the gulf between them, which day by day grew wider and more difficult to leap over?