The merrie month of May was speeding onward, and with it--fast and furious--rattling over stones, and dashing over impediments, ran the fierce strong current of “London life.” There is an intoxicating influence, especially on the inexperienced, in the rapid motion, the ever-changing aspect of pleasure, the atmosphere redolent of poisonous influences, that is breathed by the upper ten thousand in the month of May, in busy, half-mad London. By none was this insidious influence more perilously undergone than by the impressionable, weak-nerved woman who, through her own folly, considerably aided by “circumstances over which she had no control,” was standing on the very brink of the abyss, the name of which is “ruin.” It was now the middle of May, and during a swiftly-passing fortnight Honor Beacham, continuing her course of semi-deception regarding her father’s condition, and entirely concealing from the husband whom she believed to be exclusively absorbed in his own pursuits and interests the fact that her days and nights were spent in one continued round of exciting pleasure, went on her way--if not rejoicing, at least in a condition of such delightful mental inebriation, that she found barely sense or time enough to ask herself the serious question, if the life which she was leading indeed were joy. John’s answer to her letter, written under the influence of hurt feeling, and penned by a man utterly destitute, not only of the art to make a thing appear the thing it is not, but of _l’eloquence du billet_ in general, was one exactly calculated to rouse in a high-spirited nature a dormant inclination to rebel. In it there was an implied right to command, a right solely arrogated (to Honor’s thinking) by reason of the writer’s indifference to her proceedings, and scanty appreciation of her merits. “You will come back, I suppose,”--so wrote the unwise man, who, on his side, had so egregiously erred in his estimate of character,--“you will come back when you have had enough of London. I don’t say to you, ‘come home,’ for women that are made to do the thing they don’t like are, as mother says, not over and above pleasant in a house. We are uncommon busy, too, just now; there is painting to be done, and the chintz to be calendered, so perhaps you are as well out of the way of the bother.”