Meanwhile, these two were not alone in enduring, with such patience as in the first dark moments of bereavement we can summon to our aid, the consequences of guilty passions, of deceit, of vanity, and of folly. Watching, waiting, grieving,--watching and waiting for the friend who came not, and grieving with bitter tears over her past folly,--Honor sat in the dismal chamber of that dirty and barely respectable lodging-house--a piteous sight, indeed, to look upon. As usual, the sense of error had been the result of mortification and of sorrow. _Le remord est né de l’abandon et non pas de la faute_; and if Arthur Vavasour had not been prevented in a manner as yet undreamt-of by Honor from keeping his engagement with her, and aiding her in the course which she had faintly marked out for herself, it is probable that Honor would have been far longer than was actually the case in arriving at a due and contrite sense of her _mistakes_. The hours after Arthur’s departure dragged on very wearily for the imprudent girl who, a prisoner in that dismal room, began, as the time wore on and she heard nothing either of or from him, very seriously and repentantly to commune with her own thoughts. It was then that the mist of prejudice in favour of a class above her cleared away for ever; then that she no longer craved to be what is conventionally termed a “lady;” then that she learned (the teaching was a severe and uncompromising one, but none the less effectual because of the heavy hand that had been raised in teaching her)--then it was that she learned the valuable truth that sterling worth is more to be desired than the outside graces of a soft manner and a flattering tongue, and that the heart of gold is better than the glitter of a refined and fair appearance. Instead of inwardly glorying in her near kindred to the well-born, and in lieu of rejoicing over the fact that _she_ came of a gentle race, and that in her veins ran the pure Norman blood of the well-descended “Norcotts of Archerfield,” Honor Beacham would henceforth shrink in shame from the memory of her parentage, bearing ever before her the unwelcome and dishonouring truth, that the man to whom she owed the birth on which she had been weak enough to pride herself was, in very truth, nothing better than a swindler!