“For your father’s sake, young man,” he said, laying his broad hand for an instant on Arthur’s thin white lips--“for your dead father’s sake, make no ugly scandal here. If I believed you worse than foolish, I would kill you as you stand there! but I do not believe such evil of your father’s son. Go, sir, to your young wife; go and repent you of your sins; and when we meet again, God grant that I may have a better opinion than I hold now of the boy that Cecil Vavasour loved in his life so well!” Startled, overcome, and terribly confused, Arthur stood as if transfixed; while John, after hastily wrapping the trembling Honor in her opera-cloak, led her, without another word spoken, from the box. In perfect silence--a silence only broken by the woman’s violent trembling as she hung helplessly on her husband’s arm--the re-united pair left the crowded theatre together. Honor moved along as if mechanically, dreading the moment when she would be alone with the man of whose violence she had just experienced such unpleasant proof, and feeling already, with terrible force, the bitter contrast between her lot as it had lately been, and her fate as it loomed darkly, wearily before her. _Resigned_ she did not feel. The contrast was too great, too sudden; and, to speak the truth, the aspect of John in his rough overcoat, his driving-gloves, and country-made hat, did not exactly tend either to put Honor in good humour with her husband, or to reconcile her to the loss of half her evening’s amusement. Had there been in the woman’s conscience the load of even the smallest secret guilt, _fear_ would have usurped the place of anger, and all idea of rebellion would have banished from her mind. But Honor’s fit of trembling arose from no such hidden cause. No “sin,” even of thought, hitherto “unwhipt of justice,” caused her cheek to pale and her limbs to quake with fear. She was simply over-wrought, over-excited; and more than all, she was indignant. A woman--a beautiful one, that is to say--does not always calmly submit, even from a husband, to rudeness, when she has been accustomed to adulation; or to coercion, when she has been placed upon a throne, and learned to think herself a “queen for life.” She was the first to speak--the woman usually is in embarrassing cases such as that I am describing. The man, who is as a rule less nervous and excitable, and who generally speaking has his senses more under his own command, is apt to hold his tongue, and rather dread the breaking of the ice--the prelude to the startling and unpleasant plunge from which he greatly doubts that any good can possibly result. “O, John!” Honor said, “where _are_ you taking me to? You might have waited till to-morrow, and--and--I see you are so angry.” And bursting into tears, she leant her shapely little head against the side of the cab in which John had placed himself and her, and sobbed with almost hysterical violence.