For Joan Daventry shrank, with all her soul, from that coveted white house on the London road. Old ties could be resumed, was Robert's thought. He was forgetful that the ties were his, and his alone. She had no share in them and she had come to a time of life when the making of new friends is a weariness and a labor. With infinite toil and self-denial they had carved out their niche here in the Argentine Republic. They spent the winter in their house in Buenos Ayres, the summer upon the Daventry estancia. Their life was an ordered, comfortable progression of the months. For both of them, to her thinking, the time for new adventures had long gone by. They had had their full proportion of them in their youth. And so while Robert Daventry dreamed of a green future Joan was busily remembering. "When we first came here to settle," she said slowly, as she counted up all that had been done in these twenty-seven years, "we drove for two days. If the house on the London road is vivid to you, that drive is as clear to me. Our heaviest luggage was our hopes;" and Robert Daventry smiled across the table. "I have not forgotten that either," he said; and there was a whole world of love in his voice. "When we reached here we found a tin house with three rooms and nothing else, not a tree, hardly a track. Now there's an avenue half a mile long, there are plantations, there's a real brick house for the plantations to shelter. There are wells, there's a garden, there's a village at the end of the avenue, there's even a railway station to-day. These things are our doing, Robert;" and her voice was lifted up with pride. "I know," replied her husband. "But I ask myself whether the time has not come to hand them on." Once more the look of solicitude shone in his wife's eyes. "I could leave the estancia," she said doubtfully, "though it would almost break my heart to do it. But suppose we did. What would become of you in England? I have a fear," and she leaned forward across the table. "Why a fear?" he asked. "Because I think that people who have lived hard, like you and me, run a great risk if they retire just when they feel that they are beginning to grow old. A real risk of life, I mean. I think such as you and I would be killed off by inactivity rather than by any disease." She did not deny that something was wrong in their present situation. But she had a different conception of what that something was; and she had a different remedy. "We should find life too dull?" he exclaimed. "Too lonely, Joan?" and he struck the table with his hand; "I find it lonely here;" and at that she uttered a low cry: "Oh, my dear, and what of me?" and the wistfulness of her voice struck him to silence, a remorseful silence. After all, his days were full. "There's our other plan," she suggested gently. "Yes. To be sure! There's our other plan," he said. He leaned back in his chair, his face upturned toward the ceiling, and a thoughtful look in his eyes.