Abbey of a wider national service than would otherwise be possible.  In all he said on this his love for and his pride in the glorious Abbey were manifest, and it was easy to see that old historical associations, love of music, of painting, of stately architecture, were the bonds that held him bound to the “old historic Church of England.”  His emotions, not his intellect, kept him Churchman, and he shrank, with the over-sensitiveness of the cultured scholar, from the idea of allowing the old traditions to be handled roughly by inartistic hands.  Naturally of a refined and delicate nature, he had been rendered yet more exquisitely sensitive by the training of the college and the court; the polished courtesy of his manners was but the natural expression of a noble and lofty mind—­a mind whose very gentleness sometimes veiled its strength.  I have often heard Dean Stanley harshly spoken of, I have heard his honesty roughly challenged; but never has he been attacked in my presence that I have not uttered my protest against the injustice done him, and thus striven to repay some small fraction of that great debt of gratitude which I shall ever owe his memory.

And now the end came swiftly.  I had hurriedly furnished a couple of rooms in the little house, now ours, that I might take my mother into the purer air of Norwood, and permission was given to drive her down in an invalid carriage.  The following evening she was suddenly taken worse; we lifted her into bed, and telegraphed for the doctor.  But he could do nothing, and she herself felt that the hand of Death had gripped her.  Selfless to the last, she thought but for my loneliness.  “I am leaving you alone,” she sighed from time to time; and truly I felt, with an anguish I did not dare to realise, that when she died I should indeed be alone on earth.

For two days longer she was with me, my beloved, and I never left her side for five minutes.  On May 10th the weakness passed into gentle delirium, but even then the faithful eyes followed me about the room, until at length they closed for ever, and as the sun sank low in the heavens, the breath came slower and slower, till the silence of Death came down upon us and she was gone.

Stunned and dazed with the loss, I went mechanically through the next few days.  I would have none touch my dead save myself and her favourite sister, who was with us at the last.  Cold and dry-eyed I remained, even when they hid her from me with the coffin-lid, even all the dreary way to Kensal Green where her husband and her baby-son were sleeping, and when we left her alone in the chill earth, damp with the rains of spring.  I could not believe that our day-dream was dead and buried, and the home in ruins ere yet it was fairly built.  Truly, my “house was left unto me desolate,” and the rooms, filled with sunshine but unlighted by her presence, seemed to echo from their bare walls, “You are all alone.”