“But, mother,” said John, ruthlessly cutting short these maternal reminiscences, “Honor hasn’t what you call her health; and what’s more, no one can say with justice that I married a fine lady. Why, she was ready enough--too ready I might say--to work, a year agone. You just ask the Clays about her. Never sparing herself, and singing about the house like a bird. But that’s all over now,” he went on sadly. “She’s so changed, Honor is, poor child!” and the rough, kind-hearted man gulped down a sigh as he looked back upon his vanished hopes, and on the fading vision of the wife who was so different, he told himself, from the languid girl who shared his home. “It’s my belief,” said Mrs. Beacham bluntly, “that she’s pining for the Colonel.” “For the Colonel? D--n him!” burst forth John in one of those sudden passions that surprised as well as half-frightened those about him, “it’s too bad, it’s a deal too bad, to have that man for ever coming up between me and Honor! And yet I don’t believe it; upon my soul, I don’t believe it! It isn’t likely that just the name of being her father--for it’s nothing more--should make her think so much of him. Sometimes it comes into my head,” he went on meditatingly, and cutting a huge slice off the brown loaf as he spoke, “sometimes I think that it would be better to break the ice, and talk to her about him. Of course, it’s only right to honour one’s parents; and I should be the last man, I hope, to backbite and to speak ill of another; but I think--God forgive me if I’m wrong, mother!--that it might be as well just to open Honor’s eyes a little about that same father of hers. If she knew--” “You couldn’t do it, John; it wouldn’t be--as far as I can see--right; and though Honor is a love-child, and her father--according to you--would be in his proper place at Botany Bay, it isn’t for us to malign him to his own daughter. No, John,” the old woman continued, for notwithstanding her jealousy of Honor there existed in the old woman’s heart a certain fund of good sense, as well as kindliness of nature, to fall back upon in time of need,--“no, John, we must trust to Providence that all will come right in time. There’s good, after all, in Honor; and some day, perhaps, she will have done with whimsies, and take at last to sense.” CHAPTER XIII. LADY MILL HAS BUSINESS ON HAND. “Did you in all your life ever see anyone so changed as that pretty Mrs. Beacham? Not less pretty, I don’t mean that; but she looks pale and serious, and to my thinking still more like a lady than she did when she was married!” The words were Kate Vavasour’s--bright, cheerful, merry Kate--who was walking home on Christmas-day from church with her brother Horace--a “public man” now, and a very occasional and not over-willing visitor to his old home.