She glanced with something of sadness to her favourite seat under the drooping boughs of a Spanish chestnut. Her summer days had been very lonely, lacking all those elements which make the lives of women sweet and happy. For her had been no murmur of children’s voices, no pleasant cares of household, no daily expectation of a husband’s return from club or senate, office or counting-house; no weekly round of visits among the poor; no sense of duty done; only a dull, listless blank, and the last new novel, and the last new colour in _gros de Lyons_, and the last new monster in scentless, gaudy horticulture, a chocolate-coloured calceolaria, a black dahlia, a sea-green camellia japonica. “You are going to give me the whole week,” she said. “Oh, Laurence, I will try to be happy!” She said this with unwonted earnestness, and with eyes that were dim with unshed tears. And she kept her word. She did honestly try to be happy, and she succeeded in being--gay. If the gaiety were somewhat feverish, if her harmonious laugh bordered on that laughter whereof Solomon said “it was mad,” she did for the moment contrive to escape thought. This was something, for of late, thought had been only another name for care. Mr. Desmond had rowed stroke in the University Eight, and shared the Oxonian fallacy that to scull from ten to twenty miles under a broiling sun is the intellectual man’s best repose. He rested his brain from the labours of the _Areopagus_, and spent his days in pulling a roomy wherry to and fro between Hampton and Maidenhead, with Mrs. Jerningham and Lucy Alford for his passengers, and a dainty little hamper of luncheon for his cargo. The weather was lovely. The landscape through which the river winds between Hampton and Chertsey, between Chertsey and Maidenhead, is a kind of terrestrial paradise, and a paradise peopled with classic shades; and all along those pastoral, villa-dotted banks, nestled little villages and trimly-furnished inns, within whose hospitable shade the wanderers might repose, while the smart, maple-painted boat bobbed up and down at anchor in the sun. These peaceful rovers kept no count of the hours. They left River Lawn at early morning, lunched among the reedy shores below Chertsey, took their five-o’clock tea at Staines, and went home with the tide to a compound collation, which combined the elements of dinner, tea, and supper. Mrs. Colton was but too glad to forego the delights of these water-parties in favour of Lucy; nor was Laurence sorry to resign a passenger who weighed some twelve or thirteen stone, who at every lurch of the boat entertained fears of drowning; to whom every weir seemed perilous as Niagara, and every lock a descent into Hades; and whose shawls and wraps, and carriage-rugs and foot-muffs, were insufferable to behold under the summer sun.