She went straight to her daughter’s boudoir, a room with an oriel window looking across the wide expanse of the park, where the turf lay openest to the sunshine, and where the deer were wont to congregate. The garden was at its narrowest point just below this window, and consisted only of a broad gravel path, and a strip of flowers at the top of a steep grass bank that sloped down to the ha-ha which divided garden and park. The room was full of Juanita’s girlish treasures—evidences of fancies that had passed like summer clouds—accomplishments begun and abandoned—a zither in one corner—a guitar and a mandolin against the wall—an easel in front of one window—a gigantic rush work-basket lined with amber satin and crammed with all manner of silks, wools, scraps, and unfinished undertakings in another. The room remained just as she had left it when she went to London at the beginning of May. She had not occupied it during her honeymoon; and perhaps that was the reason she was here now in her desolation, sitting silent, statue-like, with Lady Jane by her side, on a sofa opposite the oriel. She lifted her eyelids when her mother came into the room, and looked up at her in speechless despair. She uttered no word of greeting, but sat dumbly. Lady Cheriton went over to her, and knelt by her side, and then, feebly, automatically, the widowed girl put her limp, cold hand into her mother’s and hid her bloodless face upon her mother’s breast. Lady Cheriton held her there with one hand while she stretched out her other hand to Lady Jane. “Dear Lady Jane, how good of you to be with her—to comfort her.” “Where else should I be?—I want to be near him!” The gentle blue eyes filled with tears, the gracious head trembled a little. Then came a long shivering sigh and silence. The mother knelt beside the sofa with her child’s head leaning forward upon her matronly bosom. There may have been some comfort perhaps in that contact, some recurrence of the thoughts and feelings of earlier years, when the mother could console every grief and soothe every pain. No words came to either of those mourners. What could be said in mitigation of a sorrow that seemed to offer no point of relief, no counter-balancing good. There was nothing to be done but to sit still and suffer. The silence lasted long, and then Juanita lifted her head suddenly from its heavy repose and looked fixedly in her mother’s face. “My father has come back with you?” she asked. “Yes, dearest. We did not lose an hour. Had there been any quicker way of travelling we would have been here sooner.”