Poor John! Could Honor have heard the heavy sigh that broke from his full heart as he closed the letter; could she, above all, have looked into that heart and read its secret sorrows, she could not have doubted of her husband’s love; and perhaps, removed from the glamour of Arthur Vavasour’s presence, from the mesmeric influence of a passion which was becoming terribly overpowering in its hourly-gathering strength, she might have been again a happy woman in the simple fashion and the humble sphere to which she had been brought up. Such a “chance,” however, was not for the foolish, beautiful woman who, with half-tender words (for, alas, it had come to that) from her high-bred adorer lingering on her memory, read the simple letter, which it had cost so much pain to write, in anger and in bitterness. Tossing it on her toilet-table with an impatient jerk, she told herself that John did not care for her. It was nothing to him, she said mentally, whether she stayed away or not; but as she inly spoke the words, the fingers of her little gauntleted hand--she had just returned from riding in the Park--dashed away something very like tears that had gathered on her long lashes and nothing short of the recollection that she was going in a few hours’ time to dine at Richmond with Arthur Vavasour and a few other friends of her father’s prevented her (for it would be dreadful to make her appearance with red eyes) from indulging in the luxury of a “good cry.” That party to London’s prettiest suburb--an evening’s enjoyment which was to include a row towards Twickenham and Teddington on the clear, flowing river, and a delicious dinner after dusk in one of the charming _cabinet particuliers_ appertaining to the Star and Garter, and opening on its pleasant gardens, had been for days looked forward to with keen anticipations of delight by Honor Beacham. They were to proceed thither in two open “_hired_ carriages,” in one of which was to be seated Honor and the Colonel’s wife, while Arthur Vavasour and a dull, unobservant Mr. Foley, a gentleman, like Pope’s women, “with no character at all,” were to occupy the opposite seats. In the second carriage the party collected was likely to be of a far more noisy, as well as a more congenial, description. Mrs. Foley--a lady a little on the wrong side of thirty, and whose animal spirits, being apt occasionally, as the saying is, to “get the better of her,” were in their full swing of triumph on such an occasion as a Richmond dinner--arrived at Stanwick-street punctually as the clock struck four, arrayed in a toilet which, but for the still more amazing costume of the young lady with whom she was accompanied, would have decidedly monopolised the attention and wonder of every female observer in that quiet neighbourhood. Shaking themselves clear of the straw and _tumble_, consequent on their cab-drive from some distant locality, Mrs. Foley and her bright-eyed sister Dora Tibbets stood on the doorsteps of No.