She had gone rambling on as if talking to herself. The fact that neither of her two companions were in the slightest degree capable of entering into the more sickly than sensible fancies of her young brain, had totally escaped her recollection, and she was startled, and that not agreeably, when John, laying down the paper he was studying, looked half sternly and half anxiously at his wife. He had not listened--who ever does listen to anything of the kind with entire impunity,--he had not listened without its producing some effect upon his mind, to his mother’s constant remarks and insinuations regarding his wife’s conduct and character. Since Arthur Vavasour’s marriage, and the consequent entire cessation of his visits at the Paddock, that _raw_ had necessarily healed, but unfortunately those whose nature it is to buzz about the sore places which will sometimes even in the healthiest skin be found, are never at a loss to detect the peccant spots, while to keep the venom rankling in the wound is to them a pleasant, chiefly because it is an exciting, task. It may seem strange to those who have not made human nature their study, that Mrs. Beacham--dearly loving her son--should have seemed to take positive delight in certain hints and allusions which, as she well knew, could not fail both to give him pain and to intensify the coldness which too evidently was beginning to exist between himself and his wife. If anyone had accused the old woman of the sins of mischief-making and evil-speaking, her surprise and indignation would have been great and vehement. In her own mind she probably believed that, by constantly endeavouring to make it appear that Honor, since the discovery of her birth, and her temporary association with those above her, had grown proud and fanciful and discontented, she, John’s mother, was simply doing her duty--a duty which had for its aim and object the wholesome correcting of “Mrs. John,” and the expedient enlightenment of a mind--her son’s, to wit--that was blinded by the mists of uxorious folly. That Mrs. Beacham was herself rendered happy by the state of things existing at the Paddocks must not be supposed; but that she was not so, proved only another exciting cause for the attacks upon Honor, which, whilst John often felt real uneasiness for Honor’s evident delicacy of health, worried the poor man terribly. Sometimes--not often, or probably his mother would have shown herself far more lenient to the pale-faced girl, who never disputed her will, but whose very submission was an aggravation--sometimes, as on the present occasion, John would turn angrily upon Honor, speaking sharply to her, after the fashion of even the best-tempered men who, without being able either to understand the _why_, or to suggest a remedy for the evil, find the comfort of their home broken up, through, as it seems to them, the wilfulness or the valetudinarianism of a woman!