He stopped abruptly; for there were circumstances connected with the possible victim of Colonel Norcott’s rascality that would effectually check any feelings of pity which John might be inclined to entertain for him. Could the mother who bore him have looked into the heart of her only child that day, she would bitterly have repented the stirring-up of the smouldering fire within which her words--uttered, as so many dangerous words _are_ uttered, without much thought of future consequences--had effected. It is easy, terribly easy, to raise the demon of suspicion and jealousy in the human breast. Were the laying of the same an equally facile task, or one equally congenial to the unregenerate nature of men and women, there would be fewer of the crimes consequent on the strength of our worst passions to record, fewer blighted lives, fewer consciences burdened with the weight of scarcely bearable remorse. But though the woman, whose tongue had wagged (without ulterior design, but simply as a consequence of her own maternal jealousy) to such fell purpose, could not read the heart she had unconsciously been working up to madness, she yet experienced something very like uneasiness when John, with the heavy cloud still lowering over his brow, and with the ruddy brown half-vanished from his cheeks (so changed was he since the poison of suspicion had suffused itself through his veins), left her alone to ruminate on the past, and anticipate darker doings in the future than she had either hoped or calculated on. That John--the dearly-beloved of her aged heart, the son of whom she was so justly proud--could prove himself, under provocation, to be of a very violent and passionate nature, she had not now to learn. He had done his best to subdue and conquer his constitutional sin; a sin, however, it was that might and did lie dormant, and indeed half forgotten, within him, from the simple fact that it required the great occasions that happily are comparatively rare in all our lives to bring it into notice and action. The blow struck in a moment of ungovernable rage at Frederick Norcott’s unprotected head had for a time, as we already know, filled John Beacham’s breast with remorse and self-reproach. He had been very angry with himself, very angry and ashamed; but that shame and anger had not, in any degree, either softened his nature or disposed him to any especial leniency towards his victim. On the contrary, the soreness produced by self-condemnation, and by imagined loss of caste, only served to better prepare the mind of the man for the reception of evil suspicions, and of perilously active venom; and when John Beacham left the quiet little parlour, and the tardily-repentant old lady, who, when it was too late, would gladly have recalled her words, he was in the mood of mind that leads, at down-hill pace, to crime.