unanimous and contented, it was decided that Lady Chesham should proceed to the scene of the war.  My sister gladly gave up this stirring role for the more prosaic, but equally important, work in London, and when I returned home, in July, 1900, I found her still completely absorbed by her self-imposed task.  Already her health was failing, and overtaxed nature was having its revenge.  During the next two years, in spite of repeated warnings and advice, she gave herself no rest, but all the while she cherished the wish to pay a visit to that continent which had been the theatre of her great enterprise.  At length, in August, 1902, in the week following the coronation of Their Majesties, we sailed together for Cape Town, a sea-voyage having been recommended to her in view of her refusal to try any of the foreign health-resorts, which might have effected a cure.  By the death of her father-in-law, my sister was then Lady Howe, but it will be with her old name of Lady Georgiana Curzon or “Lady Georgie”—­as she was known to her intimates—­that the task she achieved will ever be associated.

More than seven years had elapsed since my first visit, and nearly twenty-six months from the time I had left South Africa in the July following the termination of the Mafeking siege, when I found myself back in the old familiar haunts.  Groot Schuurr had never looked more lovely than on the sunny September morning when we arrived there from the mail-steamer, after a tedious and annoying delay in disembarking of several hours, connected with permits under martial law.  This delay was rendered more aggravating by the fact that, on the very day of our arrival,[43] the same law ceased to exist, and that our ship was the last to have to submit to the ordeal.  Many and sad were the changes that had come to pass in the two years, and nowhere did they seem more evident than when one crossed the threshold of Mr. Rhodes’s home.  The central figure, so often referred to in the foregoing pages, was no more, and one soon perceived that the void left by that giant spirit, so inseparably connected with vast enterprises, could never be filled.  This was not merely apparent in the silent, echoing house, on the slopes of the mountain he loved so well, in the circle of devoted friends and adherents, who seemed left like sheep without a shepherd, but also in the political arena, in the future prospects of that extensive Northern Territory which he had practically discovered and opened up.  It seemed as if Providence had been very hard in allowing one individual to acquire such vast influence, and to be possessed of so much genius, and then not to permit the half-done task to be accomplished.

That this must also have been Mr. Rhodes’s reflection was proved by the pathetic words he so often repeated during his last illness:  “So little done, so much to do.”