There may be some among my readers who perhaps will consider that Honor’s proceedings--her intemperate conduct in thus suddenly giving up home-ties and the respectability attendant thereon, and her apparent absence of womanly feeling regarding her husband--are overstrained and unnatural. But let it be remembered that she was young--young and inexperienced--impulsive too, as well as a little vain and exacting. To understand the young, however, the investigator into character must be young himself. When youth has passed, we forget not only the feelings that dwelt within us in the days of the long-ago past, but the excuses for our sins and follies, which then seemed to us as sands by the sea-shore in number. We forget the craving after the storms of life, the desire to be “for ever climbing after the climbing wave,” together with the loathing of sad satiety, the satiety which a quiet and unbroken existence awakens in the breast of those who are yet idle and untried enough to talk of indulging in grief, and who have still to learn the bitter truth that to endure is hard enough. Honor Beacham was so romantic and simple that she could hug to her breast the discontent which she had dignified into despair. Very like a heroine she felt as the swift train bore her onwards into the unknown regions of the future. With the sharp and scolding voice of her mother-in-law still ringing in her ears, and with the _certainty_ (for Honor was of an age and nature to believe in every result she wished for) of having escaped from Mrs. Beacham’s tyrannic rule, it was surely natural that she should feel a keen sense of triumph at her own success, and that an involuntary smile should flit over her lips as she thought of the old woman’s face of discomfiture when the startling and unwelcome discovery would be made, that her victim was already far beyond the precincts of her power.