He turned away with a faint frown of perplexity. She would have been a middle-aged woman now, the mother of grown-up daughters. To think of her like that was to think of a stranger. His old wound had throbbed because he had caught a fresh glimpse of her as the young girl he had so loved, and loved still, for she had hardly been more than a girl when she had died. He supposed he would have gone on loving her just the same; his love for her had grown no less during the short years of their married life; he had never wanted anybody else, and had never wanted anybody else since, remembering what she had been. But it was an undoubted fact that husbands and wives in middle-age had usually shed a good deal of their early love, or so it seemed to him, from his experience of married men of his own age. Would it have been so with him? He couldn't think it, but he couldn't tell. To him she would always be what she had been, even when he grew old. It was perplexing to think of her as growing old too; and there was no need to do so. The years had passed very quickly. Caroline had been only five when she had died, Beatrix three, and Barbara a baby. And now the two elder were grown up, and Barbara nearly so. It came home to him, as he looked at their photographs on the mantelpiece, how pleasant they had made life for him, and how much he still had in his home in spite of the blank that his wife's death had made. This puzzled him a little too. He thought he ought to have missed her more, and be missing her more now. But introspection was not his habit, and the hands of the clock on the mantelpiece were progressing towards the dinner hour. He dressed quickly, with nothing in his mind but pleasurable anticipation of the evening before him. Worthing was in the morning-room talking to Caroline when he went downstairs. He looked large and beaming and well washed and brushed. The greeting between the two men was cordial. Each had struck a chord in the other, and it was plain that before long they would be cronies. Worthing was outspoken in his admiration of what had been done with the house. "I've been telling this young lady," he said, "that I wouldn't have believed it possible. Nothing seems to be changed, and yet everything seems to be changed. Look at this room now! It's the one that Brett used to occupy, and it used to give me a sort of depressed feeling whenever I came into it. Now it's a jolly room to come into. You _know_, somehow, that when you go out of it, you're going to get a good dinner." He laughed with a full throat. Caroline smiled and looked round the room, which had been transformed by her art from the dull abode of a man who cared nothing for his surroundings into something that expressed home and contentment and welcome. Grafton put his arm around her as they stood before the fire. "She's a wonder at it," he said. "She's done all sorts of things to my room upstairs. I felt at home in it at once."