It chanced that in the afternoon succeeding Mr. Vavasour’s farewell visit, the widow Thwaytes, who had for many years occupied the post of humble friend to the greater lady at the Paddocks, had come panting along the lanes (for the day was warm, and the fair pedestrian inclined to “stoutness”) to take a neighbourly cup of tea with her more aristocratic crony. As the reader may possibly remember, albeit he has to glance mentally as far back as the first chapter of this story, the widow Thwaytes, being withal a good-natured woman enough, was by no means ill-disposed towards the sweet-spoken beauty of whom the Clays, and, indeed, all who knew her, “_thought_ so much.” Very willingly, and often feeling that the jealous-tempered old lady was decidedly in the wrong, would Mrs. Thwaytes have spoken her mind to her old chum and neighbour on the subject of Honor’s merits. It angered her at the first to hear Mrs. Beacham’s querulous and uncalled-for innuendoes against her daughter-in-law; but the time soon came--after it grew to be unmistakably evident that “Mrs. John meant to keep herself to herself”--when the widow went over, heart and soul, to the enemy. Her ready sympathy, which procured her many an excellent “dish” of her favourite beverage, was well appreciated by the mistress of Updown Paddocks; “mistress,” as her guest persisted in calling her, in spite of Mrs. Beacham’s plaintive assurance that she had nothing now to do with the management of John’s household, and that if things went wrong she was not answerable for them. _Her_ day was over; but the time would come, perhaps, when some people--she named no names--would find that new brooms, though they swept ever so clean, were not so good as old ones, and that pretty faces couldn’t make up for fanciful ways and idle habits. Mrs. Thwaytes would listen by the hour encouragingly to these outpourings of a wounded spirit, and though very far, as I before hinted, from an ill-natured woman, she would occasionally throw in a drop of balm in the shape of an admittance that Mrs. John was but young, that she would improve in time, and last (not least in novelty and conclusiveness), that it was a moral as well as a physical impossibility to place an old head on the shoulders of the young.