When the curtain fell, and the rushing, rustling sound betokened that the spectators, over-wrought and excited, were stretching their limbs and refreshing their brains by a change of scene and posture, John Beacham, following a sudden and uncontrollable impulse, and with no fixed purpose within his brain or choice of words upon his lips, staggered like a drunken man to the box where Honor, breathless with eagerness and her fair face flushed with excitement, had just--in entire and happy ignorance of her husband’s proximity--turned her glossy head to talk over the startling incidents of the play with Arthur Vavasour. CHAPTER IX. JOHN PROVES HIS RIGHT. As he opened the box-door, a ray of reason--there is often on such occasions something sobering in the mere presence of strangers--threw a composing light over John Beacham’s troubled brain. He was not, as we already know, a man who loved excitement and “went in” for sensation; on the contrary, his country habits and his rather matter-of-fact nature unfitted him for taking part in any emotional scene, of what kind soever it might be. Entering the box, he took off his hat with instinctive politeness; but that duty performed, he laid his hand--it was as we know an honest one, but heavy enough withal--on Honor’s snowy shoulder. What followed was the work almost of moments; but rapid though it was, the scene remained engraved on Honor’s memory for ever. As the iron fingers pressed into the delicate flesh--he could not guess, poor man, that her _first_ feeling when he entered had been one of gladness--she uttered a sharp cry of pain, and cast an appealing glance--for John’s wild looks and violent action frightened her--at Arthur. Was it in mortal man, or rather was it in the man who loved her, and who almost believed his love returned, to remain neuter, absolutely neuter, in such a case as this? It was true, quite true, that the husband was _dans son droit_, and had a right to resent as an insult the interference in his wife’s behalf of any man that lived. Of this important truth, however, Arthur remembered nothing. Blinded by passion, disturbed at a moment when, forgetful of all the world beside, he was distilling what he believed to be successful poison into the ear of the woman he adored, this spoilt child of sin, who had never denied himself a pleasure, or made during his whole stormy manhood a single sacrifice either to others or to duty, resented the entrance of Honor’s unconventional husband into his private box, as if that husband were in fact the encroacher, and _he_ the lawful possessor of the prize. White, ay, almost livid with rage, he wrenched away the hand that held the woman whom he delighted to protect, and would have spoken words of violence suited to the intemperate action, had not John Beacham, subdued for the moment by the sight of passions even stronger than his own, commanded him in a tone of startling energy to be silent.