Julie now consulted Sir William Jenner about her health, and, seeing the disastrous effect that travelling had upon her, he totally forbade her to start again for several months, until she had recovered some strength and was better able to bear fatigue.  This verdict was a heavy blow to my sister, and the next four years were ones of great trial and discomfort to her.  A constant succession of disappointed hopes and frustrated plans, which were difficult, even for Madam Liberality, to bear!

She hoped when her husband came home on leave at Christmas, 1879, that she should be able to return with him, but she was still unfit to go; and then she planned to follow later with a sister, who should help her on the journey, and be rewarded by visiting the island home of the Knights, but this castle also fell to the ground.  Meantime Julie was suffering great inconvenience from the fact that she had sent all her possessions to Malta several months before, keeping only some light luggage which she could take with her.  Amongst other things from which she was thus parted, was the last chapter of “We and the World,” which she had written (as she often did the endings of her tales) when she was first arranging the plot.  This final scene was buried in a box of books, and could not be found when wanted, so had to be rewritten and then my sister’s ideas seem to have got into a fresh channel, for she brought her heroes safely back to their Yorkshire home, instead of dropping the curtain on them after a gallant rescue in a Cornish mine, as she originally arranged.  Julie hoped against hope, as time went on, that she should become stronger, and able to follow her Lares and Penates, so she would not have them sent back to her, until a final end was put to her hopes by Major Ewing being sent on from Malta to Ceylon, and in the climate of the latter place the doctors declared it would be impossible for her to live.  The goods, therefore, were now sent back to England, and she consoled herself under the bitter trial of being parted from her husband, and unable to share the enjoyment of the new and wonderful scenes with which he was surrounded, by thankfulness for his unusual ability as a vivid and brilliant letter-writer.  She certainly practised both in days of joy and sorrow the virtue of being laetus sorte mea; which she afterwards so powerfully taught in her “Story of a Short Life.”  I never knew her fail to find happiness wherever she was placed, and good in whomsoever she came across.  Whatever her circumstances might be they always yielded to her causes for thankfulness, and work to be done with a ready and hopeful heart.  That “lamp of zeal,” about which Margery speaks in “Six to Sixteen,” was never extinguished in Julie, even after youth and strength were no longer hers:—­