Poor Honor! Poor because, tottering, wavering between good and ill, it required but a small impetus, given either way, to decide her course. If it be true (and true indeed it is) that grievous _spoken_ words are wont to stir up anger, still more certain is it that angry sentences written in moments of fierce resentment, and read in a spirit of rebellion and hurt pride, are apt to produce direful consequences. When Honor, with the charm of Arthur Vavasour’s incense of adulation still bewildering her brain, and with the distaste which the memory of old Mrs. Beacham’s society inspired her with strong upon her, read her husband’s terse and unstudied as well as not particularly refined epistle, the effect produced by its perusal was disastrous indeed. Dashing the passionate tears from her eyes, and with a wrench throwing off the dainty little bonnet and the airy mantle in which Arthur Vavasour had told her she was so exquisitely “got up,” she prepared herself to meet again at the New Adelphi the man whose influence over her, aided by the unfortunate circumstances in which she was placed, had more than _begun_ to be dangerous. On that night, her _last_ night--but--and here Honor laid down the brush with which she was smoothing out her rich rippling tresses--but must it be indeed, she asked herself, the last night that she would be free? The last night that she might hope to pass away from the wretched thraldom, the detested daily, hourly worry of her unloved and unloving mother-in-law? Must she indeed return (and at the unspoken question her heart beat wildly, half with terror and half with the joyful flutter of anticipated freedom), must she obey the _order_--for order it was, and sternly, harshly given--to place herself once more in Mrs. Beacham’s power, in the home which that domineering and unkind old woman had rendered hateful to her? To do Honor only justice, there was no glimmering, or rather, to use a more appropriate word, no overshadowing, of guilt (of guilt, that is to say, as regarded the straying of the thoughts to forbidden pleasures) in her desire--a desire that was slowly forming itself into an intention--of making a home for herself elsewhere than at the Paddocks. She had arrived, with the unreflecting rapidity of impulsive youth, at the decision that John had ceased to love, and was incapable of appreciating either her beauty or her intellect. His mother, too--and in this decision Honor was not greatly in the wrong--wished her anywhere rather than in the house where _she_ had been accustomed to reign supreme; and this being the case, and seeing also that poor Honor could expect (for did not those two threatening letters proclaim the fact?) nothing but unkindness on her return, there remained for her only the alternative--so at least she almost brought herself to believe--of separating herself from those with whom she lived in such continued and very real unhappiness.