But Mr. O'Boyneville grew tolerably cheerful by-and-by, and took his wife to dine with the oldest friends he had--the oldest surviving friends, for there was a sad list of the dead whom he had known and loved in Shannonville. Lady Cecil was pleased with the kind simple people, who received her with open arms, and were unceasing in their praises of her husband's youthful virtues. The twenty years of his professional career seemed to melt away like a dream as he sat in that Shannonville drawing-room, where tall young ladies whom he had dandled in his strong arms looked at him wonderingly, and where youthful matrons, whom he remembered as tiny toddling children, brought their tiny toddling children to his middle-aged knees. People talked as if events of a quarter of a century back had been the events of yesterday. "And don't you remember the picnic at Nikdeilslootheram, Laurence?" "And I'm sure you've not forgotten the dance at Mr. O'Hennesy's, when Patrick MacShindy proposed to Flora Machrae in the little back-parlour, and old Mr. O'Kelly caught him on his knees?" "And don't you remember the murder at Castle Sloggerom, and Major O'Wokes riding fifty miles across country on his chestnut mare, Devil's-hoof, to take the scoundrel that did it? Ah, Laurence, Shannonville's but a quiet place now, and you'd scarcely know it if you came back amongst us again." But even that genial evening amongst old friends could not quite restore Mr. O'Boyneville's spirits. "I'm sure you won't care to stay here, Cecil," he said, as they drove home to the hotel; "and I think my heart would break if I spent a week in the place." So in the bleak November, under another cloudy sky, and with another day's ceaseless rain pattering against the windows of the railway carriage, Cecil and her husband went back to Dublin, and from Dublin to Holyhead, and thence across country to Exeter, and then to Chudleigh Combe. Here there was no sign of decay, save the beautiful decay of nature. Commercial civilisation had never approached within twenty miles of the secluded old mansion half buried in the woods; and the eternal loveliness of nature is subject to no changes, save those gradual transitions through which she passes for ever and ever, serenely beautiful in every phase.