dared, would gladly have taken flight, and betaking herself to her room, have there waited in silence and solitude for her husband’s return. But to make this move required an amount of hardihood of which poor Honor was utterly incapable. She felt entirely subdued--oppressed beyond the power of description, by the very presence of her mother-in-law. Whatever resolutions--whatever plans of resistance she might have formed whilst alone, or in the presence only of her husband, faded away entirely when those light-gray, aged, but still penetrating eyes were fixed upon her, and when she knew with the intuition of fear that Mrs. Beacham was about to give her what is vulgarly called a “piece of her mind.” The dreaded exordium began after this fashion: “When you was a child, Mrs. John,” the old lady said, pushing up her spectacles and peering at Honor through her half-closed eyelids--“when you was a child, did you get any Bible learning? and was anybody good enough to teach you your catechism?” “They were,” Honor replied, opening her large blue eyes in wonder, and using, to the old lady’s disgust, the peculiar Irish form of assent which, singularly enough, seemed indigenous in this girl who had had so little experience of her fatherland--“they were;” and then she stopped, poor child, marvelling greatly to what these singular opening questions were about to lead. “Well, then,” continued Mrs. Beacham, spreading out two bony hands in simulated horror, “all I can say is, that _I_ can see _no_ excuse for you. If, besides being what I won’t defile my lips by naming, you had been turned out into the streets, as many of them creatures are, without eddication, and without knowing how to read your Bible, I _might_ have, and so might John have, passed over something; but when a gell has been taught her dooty, and, more than that, when a gentleman as is respectable is good enough to make an honest woman of her, all I can say is, that when she can behave as you have done, when she can lie and deceive, and act light with other men, why she ought--and there ain’t a decent person that wouldn’t say as much--she ought to be ashamed of herself!” To this coarse attack Honor vouchsafed no reply. The violence of invective employed by the determined old woman positively stunned her. The only feeling of which she was at all conscious was one of anger, of anger stirred up by grievous words in as gentle a breast as ever belonged to woman. The silence with which her words were received was very irritating to the speaker. She had looked forward, with very considerable satisfaction, to the moment when she should overwhelm her recreant daughter-in-law with a fire of well-merited reproaches; and now, to her infinite annoyance, her shots seemed to miss fire, and not a single one was returned as a proof that the volley had in any way been felt by the enemy.