Caroline had had her way with all the furnishing and arrangements of the Abbey when they had come to live there, but her zest for her very own little house was in no way diminished. It was almost too full of wedding presents, many of which would have been more suitable for the wife of a rich man than of a poor one. But Caroline had a genius for making a room. Mollie Pemberton opened her eyes when she saw what she had done with Stone Cottage. Mollie and her husband, the Prescotts, Worthing, and Ella Carruthers, all came to see her on the day of her arrival, or the day after, and all helped her to get into order. She thought she must know from Ella's manner if what Barbara dreaded had come to pass, or was coming to pass. But she could tell nothing. Ella was just the same to her as ever, and showed herself delighted and excited at having her back. She seemed to have nothing to hide, and talked about Grafton with the frank affection that she had always exhibited towards him. If Caroline had not seen Barbara, no idea of any change would have come to her. And yet she was not sure that Barbara was not right. On the third morning she went to the Abbey to fetch some things for her father, who was coming down that evening. It was rather sad to see it deserted, by all except the servants. But she did not feel sad on her own account. She now stood outside it, and the life it represented. She went through the large and beautiful rooms, so different from those in which her own life was to be spent, and asked herself whether she would regret anything that she had given up to marry Maurice. She could not find in herself the least desire to inhabit such a house again, even with him. She had immensely enjoyed coming to it, and dealing with it, but those enjoyments seemed now to have belonged to a different person. She had taken naturally the good things that had come to her through wealth, and found pleasure in them; but she wanted them no longer. She had something much better. Her happiness, as she went through the house, and into the gardens, was singing in her. The house and the gardens themselves had given her happiness, but it was nothing to this new-found happiness, and they spoke to her scarcely at all now for herself. She was thinking all the time of her own little house in the village. Not quite all the time. Her thoughts were much occupied with her father. The empty house, which for some time he would have to inhabit alone, or with the companionship of guests instead of that of his children who had surrounded him with love and affection, brought home to her fully for the first time what he had lost. If the light of the house had gone out for her, it had gone out for him also. But she had her home and her centre of love elsewhere.