I fear me much that the behaviour of Honor at this crisis of her life will find few to excuse it; and yet to the thinking of the lenient there will be found some plausible reasons for her folly. In the first place, she was both mentally and bodily out of health. Of neither truths, patent though they were, had she any real or wholesome suspicion. She was too young, too ignorant of cause and effect, to be aware that the life she had been leading had thrown her into a mental fever, the which, seeing that it was a malady of weakness, required the nicest care and the most judicious of treatments in order to effect its cure. Neither could she give a name to the _malaise_, showing itself in languor, in nervous headaches, and in occasional heart-palpitations; all of which, with the carelessness so common to the young, she had hitherto allowed to pass unnoticed. That she was in no frame, either of mind or body, to do battle successfully against the violence of her own feelings and forebodings is very certain; and as certain is it that, though she did not yet what is called _love_ the man who had conspired so selfishly against her peace, the image and the memory of Arthur Vavasour formed no small portion of her troubled thoughts, as she lay sobbing on her bed, and repeating to herself that she could not, would not bear the lot that lay before her. “To the old,” as someone--I know not who--has truthfully said, “sorrow is sorrow, while to the young it is despair.” Despair at least as they to whom sorrow is new count the extreme of human suffering. The smallest insect, as the inspired poet tells us, “feels a pang as great as when a giant dies;” and Honor, frail little vessel as she was, could, she believed, endure no heavier or more wearing woe than that of submitting in her fresh young beauty--the beauty that Arthur Vavasour worshipped--to the tyranny of her mother-in-law, and the cold displeasure of a husband who loved her not.