“I beg your pardon, sir; I was thinking of something else. I ought”--and his colour rose as he told the falsehood which Honor’s letter demanded of him--“I have, that is to say, to go out this morning on business connected with this horrid law-affair. There is a proposal from my man to settle it amicably, and--” “Amicably be hanged!” cried Mr. Duberly, rising from the table in a pet. “If I was you, I wouldn’t hear of being amicable; and I wonder those rascally lawyers have the face to propose such a thing.” “O, _they_ have face enough for anything!” said Arthur, who was anxiously humouring the old gentleman, to keep him in a tolerably acquiescing mood. “There is nothing, sooner or later, that any one of them, if it suited his book, wouldn’t propose. One has to look deuced sharp after them, I can tell you, sir; so I am off directly after breakfast to Lincoln’s Inn. Any commands?” pausing at the door, which, in his anxiety to escape, he had already reached. “I shall just take a look at Sophy and the brat, and then I’m off.” “Good young fellow,” Mr. Duberly muttered to himself as the sound of Arthur’s footsteps died away on the marble pavement of the inner hall; and Arthur, who was well aware of the admirable impression that his last words had made, felt no shadow of remorse for the deception of which he had been guilty. Nor did his cheek tingle with tardy shame when pretty Sophy (for she did look really pretty in the delicate paleness of invalidism) called him her darling Arthur, and whispered half fearfully (she did not wish, poor child, to be troublesome) that she would not be quite happy till she saw his face again. Glad to be released, and eager to commence with the least possible delay his new office of protector and sole friend of his beautiful Honor, Arthur, who had waited since the previous night in sleepless eagerness for his summons, bade his wife good-bye with ill-dissembled haste, and was speedily on his way to the obscure street, somewhere in the direction of the Strand, where Honor had found a temporary home. It was a narrow and certainly not an inviting-looking place that to which she in her ignorance had betaken herself. She had passed it in a four-wheeled cab on her way from the Waterloo station to--she knew not where; and reading on a bill in the front window of what looked to her inexperienced eye a respectable house, that there were lodgings to let, she desired the driver to stop, and forthwith commenced inquiries regarding the apartments in question. The mistress of the house, a rather forbidding-looking person in a tumbled black-net cap, and just the _soupçon_ of a moustache on her lip, looked slightly surprised at Honor’s appearance; and at her demand whether she would receive her as an inmate, Mrs. Casey (for so was the woman called) promptly replied in the affirmative, adding irrelevantly, as Honor thought, that though her name was Irish, she was English born and bred.