She put up a warning finger, smiling as she did so after a fashion that would have turned a steadier head than Arthur Vavasour’s. She did not mean to be “coquettish;” there was no purpose in her heart to lure him into folly and madness. Honor’s were very simple, but at the same time very cowardly, tactics--tactics, however, which have lost ere this more silly giddy women than even vanity itself. In _public_ glad to please, and feeling, really feeling pity for the man whose passion she understood without reciprocating it, Honor would “smile, and smile, and smile,” and seem to love; whilst in _private_--but then, to the best of her powers, and with an ingenuity of which none but a frightened woman could have been capable, she strove, and with good success, to postpone _sine die_ the evil hour when she would perforce be brought to book, and when the lover whose _attentions_ she would be more loth to lose than she the least suspected would insist on the decided answer which would render further trifling impossible--in private Honor might almost have been mistaken for a prude. “How can you want me to call you Arthur,” she said, with the bright smile that lit up her countenance like a sunbeam, “when you know it would be wrong--so wrong (and that is the best way to find out what _is_ wrong) that you would, or I should, be always in a most dreadful fright lest I should forget myself, and say it when other people were present? O, how I _do_ hate doing underhand things! I wish now, only it is days and days too late, that I had written everything I was about to the Paddocks. Then they might have abused me for being wilful and fond of London, and plays, and amusing things; but they could not have hated and despised me for being false.” “But,” said Arthur with a caress in his voice, which Honor, novice though she was, was at no loss to feel and understand--“but there are so many things which pass, that one cannot say to everyone--many things which are not _wrong_, as you call it, but which people at a distance would not enter into, and had better therefore know nothing about. And so they have been worrying you with letters, you poor darling, have they? Wanting you to go back, and--” “O, yes,” Honor cried, brimming over with her wrongs, her yearning for kind sympathy, and with the self-pity which ever exaggerates the misfortunes which our precious _self_ is called upon to endure--“O, yes, and Mrs. Beacham--she _is_ so disagreeable; you don’t know half how disagreeable she can be, orders me to come home, and threatens me with all sorts of horrid things. I am to be scolded and taught my duty, and,” blushing beautifully, “someone has told _them_ that I have been riding in the Park with you, and--Ah, Mr. Vavasour, I feel quite frightened, and I would rather do anything in the world almost than go back again to the Paddocks!”