'Dull!' echoed the General, clapping his hand to his knee. 'You have spoken the word. The good people in London have tired us out with festivities. Since we came home it has been one rush. Lady Elton is beginning to be sick of it, so am I. As for the girls, they must make the best of it. Two or three months of eclipse in holland frocks and brown straw hats will do the little monkeys all the good in the world.' Of course there was nothing more to be said. Mrs. Gregory smiled sweetly, and with a tremor at her heart, and an unuttered hope that if Lady Elton and the General knew more about her former life than her neighbours--a circumstance concerning which she could not be perfectly sure--they would be discreet, entered, with the enthusiasm of a friend, and the practical ability of an experienced housekeeper, into the arrangements necessary to make the new _ménage_ comfortable. As a fact the Eltons proved most delightful neighbours. Lady Elton and Mrs. Gregory struck up a friendship which, while it had the charm of novelty, drew much of its sweetness from the past. The girls, who were not little schoolmisses, as might have been imagined from their father's reference to holland frocks and straw hats, but young women ranging from twenty-two to seventeen, flashed in and out of the widow's rooms, dragged her off with them for picnics on the river, and filled up her somewhat barren days with the overflowings of their exuberant life. As for the General, who had become a great gardener in his retirement, he looked in upon his neighbour, as a general rule, once a day, to inquire after her health, and discuss the condition of their respective crops of roses and strawberries. Tom meanwhile came and went, going to town early in the morning and returning home in the evening. To the surprise of everybody he seemed to like the life. He showed a curious enthusiasm about his work, which he would call neither a business nor a profession, but an art. The evenings and the whole of Saturday and Sunday were his own property; and then he would doff his city clothes and put on the flannels that became him so well, and either spin himself up and down the river in his outrigger, to the admiration of the Elton girls, or dream on his mothers lawn, or take tea, a little primly, but withal satisfactorily, in their neighbour's charming rose-garden, whither his mother and Lady Winter, and Sir Reginald her son, and that pretty enigma, Vivien Leigh, would come; and sometimes after these tea-parties he would find himself strolling along the river with one of the girls--occasionally Grace Elton, oftener Vivien Leigh--while the ringing voices of the rest of their little party sounded behind them; until the sunlight faded, and the little stars twinkled out in the pale zenith. And so we come to that memorable day in June, from which, as Tom was accustomed to say later, everything dated.