She could not tell that adoring grandmother that the children were a burden to her, and that those intelligent speeches and delightful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words which convulsed parents and grandparent seemed to add perceptibly to her own gloom. She pretended to be interested in Tom’s letter from Eton with a modest request for a large hamper, and she made a martyr of herself by showing Susie picture-books, and explaining the pictures, or by telling Lucy her favourite Hans Andersen story, which never palled upon that young listener. “Don’t you think you would like a new one?” Juanita would ask. “No, no, not a new one—the same, please. I want ‘The Proud Darning Needle.’” So the adventures of “The Proud Darning Needle” had to be read or related as the case might be. Juanita took Lady Jane’s advice and spent the greater part of every day in her morning-room, that room which had been Godfrey’s den. It was further from the staircase than any other sitting-room, and the clatter and the shrill voices were somewhat modified by distance. The house-party amused themselves after their hearts’ desire, and worked the horses with the true metropolitan feeling that a horse is an animal designed for locomotion, and that he can’t have too much of it. Lady Jane was the most indulgent of deputy hostesses, and spent all breakfast time in cutting sandwiches of a particularly dainty kind for her sons-in-law, so that they might be sustained between the luxurious home breakfast at nine, and the copious luncheon with which the cart met the shooters by appointment at half-past one. When the shooters had started there were the little Grenvilles to slave for; and Lady Jane spent another half-hour in seeing them off upon their morning constitutional, Lucy on her Shetland, and Johnnie, Susie, and Godolphin on their short little legs, with groom and nurses in attendance. There were so many wraps to be adjusted, so many injunctions to be given to nurses and groom, so many little pockets to be filled with gingerbreads and queen-cakes, while Mrs. Grenville looked on, and protested against grandmamma’s infraction of hygienic rules. Dr. Dobson Drooce had said they must _never_ eat between meals. Juanita rarely appeared before afternoon tea, when she was generally installed in her own particular easy-chair by the fire, fenced round by a seven-leaved Indian screen, which was big enough to include a couple of small tables and a creepie stool, before the sisters-in-law came in from their afternoon drive, or the shooters dropped in after their day in the woods. There were no other guests than the sisters and their husbands; and it was an understood thing that no one else should be asked, unless it were Lord and Lady Cheriton, the Dalbrooks from Dorchester, or Mr. Scarsdale.