He stopped, half afraid, in that public spot, on the well-frequented road, where the girl’s striking beauty attracted every passer’s eye to gaze upon her lovely face, of the emotions which his words had so evidently aroused within her breast. At that moment, judging from outward signs--from the rapid rise and fall of the bosom, shapely as that of the glorious statue that entranced the world, and from the changing colour of her rounded cheek--the accusation of coldness was not altogether warranted by appearances. And yet from those signs and symptoms the inference which Arthur drew was very decidedly a wrong, or rather an exaggerated, one. Honor was not in the least what is called “in love” with the man whose own passions and wild worship of his neighbour’s wife were making such desperate work within his inner man. Almost utterly reckless had those days of constant communion with her made him. He had cried havoc and let loose the dogs of contending passions within his breast; and if he had ever, when the waves of temptation were beginning to rise and swell, said unto them with an honest and true heart, “So far shalt thou go, and no farther,” that time was long since gone and over, and the submission of Cecil Vavasour’s son to the great enemy of mankind was an accomplished and a melancholy fact. But partly perhaps because the man who really feels an overpowering passion has less chance of _moving_ the object of that passion than has the hypocrite who feigns a devotion which he is far from feeling. Honor Beacham did not, as I said before, _love_ Arthur Vavasour. _Like_ him she did; and greatly did she prize his devotion, his delicate compliments, his evident and irrepressible appreciation of the attractions for which her busy unsophisticated husband, the man whose affections were not for the moment, but for Time, appeared to care so strangely little. But although the eloquent blood that rose to neck and brow had not its source in the inner, and to Arthur the undiscovered, depths of her affection, although the visible palpitations of her heart could not with truth be traced to the consciousness of harbouring one unholy or forbidden thought, still Arthur’s words and sighs and glances produced upon this child of nature effects precisely analogous to those which might have been displayed had the love which he professed and felt been returned tenfold into his bosom. “I did not mean to be unkind and cold,” she stammered. “Quiet, Nellie!” (to the mare she rode, and whose mild _caracoles_ her own agitation was provoking). “It was all my fault for talking about going home; and, Mr. Vavasour--” “Call me Arthur,” he broke in impetuously; “even you, who grudge me every word that is not stiff and formal, even you can see no harm in--when we are alone together--calling me by my name? Honor, I--”