The game at picquet with Arthur, who, poor fellow, was all the while wishing his father-in-law, if not exactly in his grave, at least a hundred miles away, was played by this light-hearted grandpapa with a zest and spirit which set Arthur (who was at that time taking rather a gloomy view of human life) wondering how any man in his senses could have lived to the age of three-score years and ten without having arrived at the conclusion that all things (including a dull game with painted pasteboard) here below are, with no single exception, only vanity and vexation of spirit. CHAPTER XVI. OUT AT SEA. The sun rose bright and cloudless on the day following Honor’s return; and John Beacham, whose hands were, as usual, brimful of business, and who moreover had decided, after a short consultation with himself, that his womankind were more likely to come to a good understanding without him, betook himself, immediately after breakfast, to the hay-fields, which were ripe for the scythe, and only waited the master’s fiat to lie in promising swaths upon the rich meadow-land which called John Beacham owner. Honor saw him depart with a weary sigh. The prospect of a lengthened _tête-à-tête_ with the stern old lady, whose brow never relaxed for a passing moment from its rigidity, and who had not even vouchsafed a distant “good-morning” in answer to her civil greeting, was a penance which it almost made her blood run cold to think of. Her own courage--the temporary boldness which was the offspring of hurt feeling and great but temporary excitement--had oozed out either at the ends of her taper fingers, or with the tears with which she had watered her morning pillow. When she found herself alone with her dreaded foe, poor Honor had not--as the saying goes--a word to throw at a dog; she was in the mood to cry her eyes out, and in the temper to long earnestly for pity and tenderness. One kind and encouraging word, one look even of sympathy, would have brought the poor thing on her knees before her natural enemy, and all might have been well between the pair whom God had joined together in bonds that nought save sin could sever.