But that was only the first of a series of continual visits, during which, as was inevitable, the intimacy grew. The piano was opened on the third or fourth occasion, and after that the children no longer formed part of Mrs Brunton's _mise en scène_. She did not any longer feel it necessary to keep them in the front, to keep herself and her visitor in continual remembrance of her widowhood and her responsibilities. When a friend comes two or three times in a week, you cannot be always in a state of preparation for him. You must occasionally fall off your guard, forget that there is anything in his presence that needs to be guarded against. The children came in whenever they pleased, but it was the hour for their walk, or they preferred to play in the garden, which was much better for them. And Nelly forgot: sometimes it seemed to her that she forgot everything, their very existence, and poor Jack who was dead, and India and all her experiences, and was for a moment now and then as she had been when Jack was a young lover, and she was nineteen--at home in the old days. It is curious how a woman, who has had a home of her own for many years, goes back to the time when her father's house was the only place that bore that name. "We used to do that at home," the matron will say, with a smile or a tear, realising in a moment the girl she used to be--with how much stronger reason when she is only parted from it by some half-dozen years. Nelly felt as if she were again a girl at home during many of those golden afternoons, as if nothing had ever happened, as if her life were as yet all to come. She forgot herself, and that position which had been so much impressed upon her by all her friends. Poor Nelly! It was very wrong for a woman who was a widow, and had been a widow not eighteen months; but she was young, and her heart was very light and elastic, rebounding from the deep gloom which was so unnatural to her character and to her age. For her character, I need not say, was not a solid and steady one, as that of the mother of these two little children ought to have been. And it was so sweet to be young again, to receive the homage which seemed so genuine, to have the companionship which was so entrancing, to sing with that other voice which was so suited to hers, to talk and smile, and be amused, and find the time fly. She did not know many people--nobody, indeed, but good Mrs Glynn and the girls, who were absorbed in parish work and mothers' meetings, in which they had hoped and expected Mrs Brunton would take her part. They had wanted her to take a district; they had set apart many things in which she ought to take an interest. But Nelly's interest had never been awakened in such things. She would have been dull, very dull, in her new home if it had not been for that very different kind of interest which was so much more in her way. It is impossible, when you have an excellent nurse who really knows much better what is right than