And there’s no sense in listening to Grumpy’s prophecies. Where is the pleasure of growing old if one can’t learn to distil from one’s experiences the essential oil of hope? When the Peon and I fell out, hopelessly, desperately, eternally, about six months before we were married, I was just a young thing, and quite pardonable in my belief that my life was ruined forever by the cataclysm. But from the vantage-ground of twenty-odd years of additional living I should be able to detect the flimsiness of the average impenetrable barrier. I don’t think Caro cares for any one else, at least; and if they’re not meddled with they’ll work it out their own way, which must be the best way for the Peon and me. And if he and I can’t enjoy ourselves very much just now, why, we don’t want to when the children are miserable; so that’s all right, of course. As to their misery, I have at least come far enough in life myself to know that it has—or will have—its mitigations. I never yet have been in a hole—and heaven knows life has been a procession of holes these last years—that I didn’t get out of it with some added capacity of living that made being in holes worth while. Why should I begrudge the children their own hole-adventures and discoveries, their own enrichment of life? * * * * * _May 22nd._ The Peon comes home early these days and takes me out for a ride. I can sit in my chair or lie down at will; and he wheels me over the soft grass to all the places I’ve been longing to see and have only beheld in Make-Believe. We go down to the brook nearly every day about sunset and watch the birds quenching their thirst before bedtime. There are many song sparrows down there; and the killdeers haunt the banks at all time, whirring up when startled with wild cries, their breasts and lifted wings flashing snow-white beneath, and the rich salmon of the lower back gleaming as they rise from the valley into the level sunlight along the brow of the hill. The Peon flattens my chair to a couch, and throws himself on the grass or sits on the roots of a sycamore, while we talk of all the years that the children have been growing up with us, and of what the future is to bring. We are both very strenuously cheerful. And indeed, in our hearts, we do hope honestly to have them both at home again some day. Only it seems rather a long way off sometimes; and the house is so very quiet when we go back.