Lady Maulevrier sighed as she read this letter, sighed again, and heavily, as she put it back into the envelope.  Alas, how many and many a year had gone, long, monotonous, colourless years, since she had seen that bright southern world which she was now urged to revisit.  In fancy she saw it again to-day, the tideless sea of deepest sapphire blue, the little wavelets breaking on a yellow beach, the white triangular sails, the woods full of asphodel and great purple and white lilies, the atmosphere steeped in warmth and light and perfume, the glare of white houses in the sun, the red and yellow blinds, the pots of green and orange and crimson clay, with oleanders abloom, the wonderful glow of colour everywhere and upon all things.  And then as the eyes of the mind recalled these vivid images her bodily eyes looked out upon the rain-blotted scene, the mountains rising in a dark and dismal circle round that sombre pool below, walling her in from the outer world.

‘I am at the bottom of a grave,’ she said to herself.  ’I am in a living tomb, from which there is no escape.  Forty years!  Forty years of patience and hope, for what?  For dreams which may never be realised; for descendants who may never give me the price of my labours.  Yes, I should like to go to my dear one.  I should like to revisit the South of France, to go on to Italy.  I should feel young again amidst that eternal, unchangeable loveliness.  I should forget all I have suffered.  But it cannot be.  Not yet, not yet!’

Presently with a smile of concentrated bitterness she repeated the words ‘Not yet!’

’Surely at my age it must be folly to dream of the future; and yet I feel as if there were half a century of life in me, as if I had lost nothing in either mental or bodily vigour since I came here forty years ago.’

She rose as she said these words, and began to pace the room, with quiet, firm step, erect, stately, beautiful in her advanced years as she had been in her bloom and freshness, only with another kind of beauty—­an empress among women.  The boast that she had made to herself was no idle boast.  At sixty-seven years of age her physical powers showed no signs of decay, her mental qualities were at their best and brightest.  Long years of thought and study had ripened and widened her mind.  She was a woman fit to be the friend and counsellor of statesmen, the companion and confidant of her sovereign:  and yet fate willed that she should be buried alive in a Westmoreland valley, seeing the same hills and streams, the same rustic faces, from year’s end to year’s end.  Surely it was a hard fate, a heavy penance, albeit self-imposed.

Lesbia went straight from Scotland to Paris with Sir George and Lady Kirkbank.  Here they stayed at the Bristol for just two days, during which her hostess went all over the fashionable quarter buying clothes for the Cannes campaign, and assisting Lesbia to spend the hundred pounds which her grandmother had sent her for the replenishment of her well-provided wardrobe.  It is astonishing how little way a hundred pounds goes among the dressmakers, corset-makers, and shoemakers of Lutetia.