There could scarcely have been found a more good-natured _chaperone_, _duenna_,--call her what you will,--than the Colonel’s lanky wife, seated opposite to dull, sleepy Mr. Foley, who, by the way, was an individual of no particular profession, gaining a precarious livelihood as “director” to one or two doubtful companies, and having a floating capital in the same. Mrs. Norcott, under cover of her pink parasol, kept up a dozy conversation with that harmless man of business, while Arthur Vavasour, who had no right whatever (seeing that his young wife was in the most delicate of situations--nervous during his absence, and only comforted by the certainty that he was within call) to be there at all, had--alas for the credit of poor selfish human nature!--forgotten every duty, and ignored the sacred claims of wifehood, for the sake of passing a few blissful hours by the side of the forbidden woman he adored. And she--that other wife, who still, strange as it may seem, and eke impossible to many, kept a large corner in her heart for home and duty, and the rough, tender-hearted man she called her husband--what were her thoughts, her feelings, as the tempter, with his bold beseeching eyes fixed on her blushing face, told her, in looks more dangerous still than words, the bewildering, but as yet only half-welcome truth that she was all the world to him, and that, to gain her love, he would cast to the four winds of heaven every tie on earth, as well as every hope of heaven? For it had come to that with this “fond, foolish,” passionate young man. Made of the stuff that loves in wild extremes, unused to put a bridle on his fierce desires, restrained by no sweet early home-affections, the dear love, mother-love, that bids the profligate, sometimes in his wildest moments, to go no further--only a myth to him--with a God above but half believed in, and himself the deity on earth he worshipped--who can wonder that this man, vigorous with the strength and health of his one-and-twenty years, should make no effort to resist the devil that, without resistance, _would_ not flee from him? “How glad I am that you remembered the Park,” Honor said, as they, the carriages following at a foot’s pace, sauntered slowly along the beautiful wooded brow beyond Pembroke Lodge; “I would not have missed this view for the world.” They were together now,--those two who had been better far had the wide seas divided them--those two who could not but have owned that so it was, had any put the question to them in the rare sober moments which nineteen and twenty-one, in the heyday of folly and of love, are blessed with. The rest had strolled away in pairs; so that Arthur could speak as well as look his love into the bewildering eyes of his friend’s lovely wife.