When the Austins returned from Malta in 1838, Lucie began to appear in the world; all the old friends flocked round them, and many new friends were made, among them Sir Alexander Duff Gordon whom she first met at Lansdowne House.  Left much alone, as her mother was always hard at work translating, writing for various periodicals and nursing her husband, the two young people were thrown much together, and often walked out alone.  One day Sir Alexander said to her:  ’Miss Austin, do you know people say we are going to be married?’ Annoyed at being talked of, and hurt at his brusque way of mentioning it, she was just going to give a sharp answer, when he added:  ‘Shall we make it true?’ With characteristic straightforwardness she replied by the monosyllable, ‘Yes,’ and so they were engaged.  Before her marriage she translated Niebuhr’s ’Greek Legends,’ which were published under her mother’s name.

On the 16th May, 1840, Lucie Austin and Sir Alexander Duff Gordon were married in Kensington Old Church, and the few eye-witnesses left still speak with enthusiasm of the beauty of bridegroom and bride.  They took a house in Queen Square, Westminster, (No 8, with a statue of Queen Anne at one corner), and the talent, beauty, and originality, joined with a complete absence of affectation of Lady Duff Gordon, soon attracted a remarkable circle of friends.  Lord Lansdowne, Lord Monteagle, Mrs. Norton, Thackeray, Dickens, Elliot Warburton, Tennyson, Tom Taylor, Kinglake, Henry Taylor, and many more, were habitues, and every foreigner of distinction sought an introduction to the Duff Gordons.  I remember as a little child seeing Leopold Ranke walking up and down the drawing-room, and talking vehemently in an olla-podrida of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with now and then a Latin quotation in between; I thought he was a madman.  When M. Guizot escaped from France on the outbreak of the Revolution, his first welcome and dinner was in Queen Square.

The first child was born in 1842, and soon afterwards Lady Duff Gordon began her translation of ‘The Amber Witch’; the ‘French in Algiers’ by Lamping, and Feuerbach’s ‘Remarkable Criminal Trials,’ followed in quick succession; and together my father and mother translated Ranke’s ’Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg’ and ‘Sketches of German Life.’  A remarkable novel by Leon de Wailly, ‘Stella and Vanessa,’ had remained absolutely unnoticed in France until my mother’s English version appeared, when it suddenly had a great success which he always declared he owed entirely to Lady Duff Gordon.

In a letter written to Mrs. Austin from Lord Lansdowne’s beautiful villa at Richmond, which he lent to the Duff Gordons after a severe illness of my father’s, my mother mentions Hassan el Bakkeet (a black boy):  ’He is an inch taller for our grandeur; peu s’en faut, he thinks me a great lady and himself a great butler.’  Hassan was a personage in the establishment.  One night, on returning