After a time--that is to say, when her husband had been dead about half a year--Mrs. Hazeldine, at Fanny's prompting and instigation, began to receive such of her friends and acquaintances as chose to favor her with their company to five o'clock tea. It was a species of mild dissipation, such as she would not have ventured upon during her husband's lifetime; but she was not long in discovering that it imparted a zest to existence undreamed of before. Mrs. Hazeldine could not afford to keep a carriage, and being naturally indolent, she had a great distaste for walking exercise, while she was one of those women who have a perpetual craving for society, and whose mental exigencies, so to call them, are not satisfied without an ample supply of gossip--not for the world would one call it scandal--and a knowledge of all that is happening within the limited round of their acquaintance, from the arrival of Mrs. A.'s latest baby to the appearance at church of Mrs. Z. in a new and ultrafashionable bonnet. As matters were now arranged, she could enjoy herself to her heart's content without the necessity of setting foot across her own threshold. To be expensively dressed--and mourning can be made very expensive, as some of us know to our cost--and to receive a constant succession of visitors in your own drawing-room, who are just as ready to tell you everything there is to tell--with, it may be, a few more or less fanciful additions of the narrator's own incorporated here and there--as you are to listen to it, and yet who neither put you to too much outlay in return, nor stay long enough to bore you--can anything be more delightful? To Fanny Hazeldine the first three or four months after her father's death were the dreariest she had ever known. The dreadful nature of the tragedy which had overshadowed her own and her mother's life had the effect of intensifying their bereavement in the eyes of the world, and, for the time, of isolating them more completely than if Mr. Hazeldine's death had resulted from natural causes. That Fanny doffed her "horrid crape" at the earliest possible date goes without saying. She was fully alive to the fact that the soft semi-tones of half-mourning became her admirably; and before long she began to plume herself for further conquests. But, indeed, when she came once more to cast her eyes around, the prospect was a most disheartening one; for where is the use of a young Amazon donning her armor and going forth on conquest bent, when with every year that passes it becomes a more difficult matter to find anyone on whom it is worth while to try one's prowess? And that such is becoming the case in Ashdown can no longer be denied. More and more the young men, while not yet out of their teens, take to turning their back on their provincial homes, going to fight the battle of life, and find wives for themselves elsewhere.