Some minutes later, a servant sent to Lady Ogram’s room by the retreating combatant found her mistress lying unconscious.  For a day or two the lady of Rivenoak was thought to be near her end; but the struggle prolonged itself, hope was seen, and in three months’ time the patient went about her garden and park in a bath chair.  Doctors opined that she would never walk again; yet, before six months were out, Lady Ogram was down in Cornwall, taking the air very much as of old.  But her aspect had greatly changed; her body had shrunk, her face had become that of an old, old woman.  Then it was that she renewed her falling locks, and appeared all at once with the magnificent crown of auburn hair which was henceforth to astonish beholders.

More than ten years had now elapsed since that serious illness.  Lady Ogram’s age was seventy-nine.  Medical science declared her a marvel, and prudently held it possible that she might live to ninety.

What to do with her great possessions had long been a harassing subject of thought with Lady Ogram.  She wished to use them for some praiseworthy purpose, which, at the same time, would perpetuate her memory.  More than twenty years ago she had instructed her solicitor to set on foot an inquiry for surviving members of her own family.  The name was Tomalin.  Search had gone on with more or less persistence, and Tomalins had come to light, but in no case could a clear connection be established with the genealogical tree, which so far as Arabella had knowledge of it, rooted in the person of John Tomalin of Hackney, her grandfather, by trade a cabinet-maker, deceased somewhere about 1840.  Since her illness, Lady Ogram had fallen into the habit of brooding over the days long gone by.  She revived the memory of her home in Camden Town, of her life as a not-ill-cared-for child, of her experiences in a West-end workroom, her temptations, multiplied as she grew to the age of independence, her contempt of girls who “went wrong,” these domestic quarrels and miseries which led to her breaking away and becoming an artists’ model.  How remote it all was!  Had she not lived through it in a prior existence, with rebirth to the life of luxury and command which alone seemed natural to her?  All but sixty years had passed since she said good-bye for ever to Camden Town, and for thirty years at least, the greater part of her married life, she had scarce turned a thought in that direction.  Long ago her father and mother were dead; she knew of it only from the solicitor, Mr. Kerchever, who, after the death of Sir Quentin, gave her a full account of the baronet’s pecuniary relations with the Tomalin household.  No blackmailing had ever been practised; the plumber and his wife were content with what they received, (Arabella felt a satisfaction in remembering that of her own accord she had asked her husband to do something for them, when she might very well have disregarded them altogether,) and the two brothers, who were supposed to have left England, had never been heard of again.  The failure to discover anyone named Tomalin whom she could regard as of her own blood was now a disappointment to Lady Ogram; sometimes she even fretted about it.  Mr. Kerchever had it in charge to renew the inquiry, to use every possible means, and spare no outlay.  The old woman yearned for kinsfolk, as the younger sometimes do for offspring of their own.