But if not happy--happy, that is to say, with the bliss which, like the joys of childhood, is simply the result of ignorance, and sometimes the consequence of want of feeling or want of sense--there were yet sufficient elements of happiness remaining in John Beacham’s home for hope to crop out greenly from the arid sands of past regret. Not yet had the time, the dreary time when no pleasure is taken in any created thing, arrived for them; not yet had the hour struck when in the voice of Nature there is no joyful sound, when the opening spring, the song of birds, the murmur of the rippling water, appeal to the heart in vain, and when the man who has striven through life to do his duty, and has failed to reap the reward of peace and the fruition of content, tells himself, in bitterness of spirit, that from the first step in life he had chosen the wrong path, and whispers sadly to his heart that it is all too late, alas, to retrace his steps. “He writes very unhappily, John,” Honor was saying. Her husband had a letter that they had been reading in his hand--a letter to John from Arthur Vavasour. It was the second that they had received from him; the first having been one so touchingly penitent that John Beacham for a long while after reading it was more than usually silent, keeping its contents to himself, and not alluding afterwards, in any way whatsoever, to the young man’s letter. But, if possible, he was after receiving it still more tender to Honor than he had been before; watching her, as she flitted about his sickroom, with eyes that glistened as they looked on her. As soon as he was equal to the exertion, John answered the humble letter, which, coming as it did from the son of one whose memory was very dear to him, and whose good works were embalmed with the myrrh, aloes, and cassia of deep respect in the righteous man’s heart, gave deep and sincere pain to its recipient; and in his reply to the penitent effusion poor John took, as such an unselfish man was certain to do, a great portion of the blame, the guilt indeed, of all that had occurred upon himself. Had a stranger read John’s simple letter, he would very naturally have believed that the writer was guilty of other and worse offences than that of an impulsive yielding to first impressions, and of speaking hasty words with his tongue.