The widow had taken possession of her new home, the home which they two were to have lived in for half a century of loving union. They had joked about their golden wedding as they sat at lunch on the lawn that day; had laughed at the thought of how they would look in white hair and wrinkles, and then had sighed at the thought of how those they loved now would be gone before that day came, and how the friends who gathered round them would be new friends, the casual acquaintances of the passing years promoted to friendship in the place of those earlier, nearer, dearer friends whom death had taken. They had talked of their silver wedding, which seemed a happier idea; for dear Lady Jane and Juanita’s mother and father might all live to see that day. They would be old, of course, older by five and twenty years; but not too old to be happy and beloved. The young wife and husband pictured the lawn on which they were sitting crowded with friends and tenants and villagers and children; and planned the feasting and the sports, which were to have a touch of originality, something out of the beaten track, which something was not easy to devise. And now she and Lady Jane were sitting in the same spot, in the sultry August evening, two desolate women; the tawny giant at their feet, _his_ dog, the mastiff Styx, looking up at them now and then with great serious eyes, as if asking what had become of his master. Juanita was strangely altered since the days of her honeymoon. Her cheeks had hollowed, and the large dark eyes looked larger, and gave a haggard expression to the pallid face; but she was bearing her sorrow bravely for Lady Jane’s sake, as Lady Jane had done for her sake, in the beginning of things. That gentle lady had broken down after the funeral, and Juanita had been constrained to forget her own agony for a brief space in trying to comfort the bereaved mother; and so the two acted and re-acted upon each other, and it was well for them to be together. They had settled down in the old house before they had been there a week. Lady Jane put off her return to Swanage indefinitely. She could drive over now and then to supervise the gardening, and she would stay at the Priory as long as Juanita wanted her. “That would be always,” said Juanita. “Ah, my love, that would not do. I don’t forget all that has been written about mothers-in-law. There must be some truth in it.” “Oh, but you forget. That is when there is a son and husband to quarrel about,” said Juanita, with a sudden sob. “We have no cause for jealousy. We have only our dead.” Lady Jane wanted to establish her daughter-in-law in that cheerful sitting-room which had been her own, but here Juanita opposed her. “I am not going to have it—now,” she said, resolutely. “It shall be your room always. No one else shall use it. I am going to have his room for my den.” “My dearest, it is the dullest room in the house.” “It was his room, and I like it better than any other in the world.”