The two young men drove to Milbrook Priory on the following day, Theodore feeling painfully eager to discover what change the last few months had made in Juanita. She had been in Switzerland, with Lady Jane and the baby, living first at Grindelwald, and later in one of those little villages on the shores of the lake of the forest cantons, which combine the picturesque and the dull in a remarkable degree—a mere cluster of chalets and cottages at the foot of the Rigi, facing the monotonous beauty of the lake, and the calm grandeur of snow-capped mountains, which shut in that tranquil corner of the earth and shut out all the busy world beyond it. Nowhere else had Juanita felt that deep sense of seclusion, that feeling of being remote from the din and press of life. And now she was again at the Priory. She had settled down there in her new position, as widow and mother, a woman for whom all life’s passionate story was over, who must live henceforward for that new life growing day by day towards that distant age of passion and of sorrow through which she had passed suddenly and briefly, crowding into a month the emotions of a lifetime. There are women who have lived to celebrate their golden wedding who in fifty years of wedlock have not felt half her sum of love, and who in losing the companion of half a century have not felt half her sum of grief. It is the capacity for loving and suffering which differs in different people, and, weighed against that, Time counts but little. She received her cousin with all her old friendliness. She was a little more cheerful than when last they met, and he saw that the new interest of her life had done good. Lady Jane was at Swanage, and Juanita was alone at the Priory, though not without the expectation of company a little later in the year, as the sisters and their husbands were to be with her before the first of October, so that the expense of pheasant-breeding might not be altogether wasted. “You must be here as much as you can in October, Theodore,” she said, “and help me to endure Mr. Grenville and Mr. Morningside. One talks nothing but sport, and the other insists upon teaching me the science of politics.” She received Cuthbert Ramsay with a serious sweetness which charmed him. Yes, she was verily beautiful among women, exceptionally beautiful. Those southern eyes shone star-like in the settled pallor of her face, and her whole countenance was etherealized by thought and grief. It touched the stranger to see how she struggled to put away the memory of her sorrow and to receive him with all due hospitality—how she restrained herself as she showed him the things that had been a part of her dead husband’s existence, and told him the story of the old house which had sheltered so many generations of Carmichaels.