The five years that followed Mary Wescott’s wedding brought many changes into the lives of the persons who make this story. From the Wescott parents in partnership they exacted the unpleasant necessity of becoming accustomed to an empty house, although they did offer some compensation in the presentation of two grandsons, who, since they early favored their Grandfather Wescott in features, might very probably have inherited also his manner of looking at certain important matters. To Father Wescott himself those years were nothing short of cataclysmic. The entire West, he told Mrs. Wescott daily, was going crazy, the middle portion over that unsound principle of coöperation, and certain far States in their unprecedented stand upon the recall of judges. As though a party, dedicated from its early infancy to Progress, could look upon such extremists, at their best, as anything short of anarchists! The East must stand firm! Father Wescott accepted this decision as his battle-cry, and, with many misgivings, bought an automobile, a vehicle which itself demanded in those days no small amount of coöperation on the part of its owner. By means of this locomotion Father Wescott could exhort the county at least to stand firm in its loyalty to the safe and sane gentleman then in the presidential chair. This he did while Mrs. Wescott sat by his side in numberless dooryards, a patient listener to conversations which, she feared, must ultimately prove useful to her also, if someone did not stop those absurd women in Washington. To Cynthia the years were kind, for not only did they convince her that she was doing the thing she loved most, which conviction is in itself no mean possession, but one of them took her to far places--to England, where she studied at Oxford and dreamed away long hours under the great trees at Iffley Church; to Germany, where she walked in the Harz Mountains and in Nuremberg ate cakes frosted with fairy tales; and to Paris, where she wandered for days through the Louvre, lived in the Latin Quarter, and in every other shop bought presents for her nephews. John and Roger, beneath the elms and in the echoing old halls of their father’s and Mr. Longfellow’s college, found life not unfriendly, though Greek was passing away and though a new and strange variety of poetry had begun to replace in the affection of students the long cadences of Mr. Algernon Swinburne. Indeed, John, who had taken to writing verses in private, composed in these new, uncertain measures some lines descriptive of an ancient church, standing within gray walls and bathed in more ancient moonlight.