distanced? What would happen to him if--and the idea was not by any means a novel one--he could not trust the unprincipled associate in his scheme? what would happen if Honor’s father should in some way or other--Arthur had never gone the lengths of guessing _how_--play him at the eleventh hour false? These and sundry other such-like questions were easy enough--as tormenting questions usually are--to ask, but the responses to them were not in the present case forthcoming. Plodding on, with anything but a young man’s elastic spring, Arthur wended his way to Hyde-park-gardens; and grievous as the truth must seem, there was not, in the certainty that one warm woman’s heart would throb with joy at his return, a drop of balm to soothe the wounds from which he suffered. And reason good was there that so it should be, for those wounds were of his own inflicting--dealt by his own guilty hand, and not to be healed save by the slow and painful process of repentance and atonement. Slowly, then, and with a troubled spirit, this man, who to the world’s eye appeared one of the most favoured of Fortune’s adopted darlings, proceeded on his way. Arrived at the grand spacious house, with its marble portico, its solid pillars, and its sculptured ornamentation, which he called his home, he paused for a moment, looking up with some feeling of undefined surprise at the more than usual amount of light which found its way through the closed shutters of the several windows. Almost before, however, he had time to lay his hand on the bell, the door was softly opened by a servant who had evidently been on the watch for his arrival, and a low voice--the voice of the hall-porter, softened and subdued in compliment to the momentous occasion--informed the young master of the house that Mrs. Vavasour had half an hour before given birth to a fine boy, and was “as well as could” reasonably “be expected.” CHAPTER XI. FROM LIVELY TO SEVERE.