The great questions was, Would she live to complete her task?  Owing to an incurable complaint she could give only a limited portion of her time to the work, and there were whole days in which no progress was made.  Every page bears evidences of hurry.  We have already told the story of the three appearances of Sir Richard just before the burning of The Scented Garden Ms. Lady Burton persistently declared that after the third appearance her husband came again and never left her until she had finished her work.  “He was constantly with me,” she said to Mr. Murray, “appearing exactly as in life, and he advised and comforted me.  He helped me most materially towards the compilation of his own biography, and gave me references to books and manuscripts so that the biography came comparatively easy to my hand.  He gave me absolutely the position of the book in the shelf and the page and reference itself which I required.”

A letter[FN#683] of one of Burton’s friends contains the following comments on the work.  “I plainly see that the objects of writing the Life were two-fold.  First to prove Sir Richard a Roman Catholic, and thus fit him to be buried with her, and secondly to whitewash his escapades and insubordination.  As to the first, I know he despised[FN#684] the Roman Catholic religion; and if any very deep sense of religious feeling existed at all, it was of the Mohammedan rather than anything else; but his religion was not very apparent, though he was fundamentally an honest and conscientious man, and I think he had but one enemy—­himself.  He was a very great man; very like a magnificent machine one part of which had gone wrong—­and that was his hot temper.”

Lady Burton’s book was finished at Mortlake on 24th March 1893, and appeared in the autumn of that year.  She then commenced the issue of the Memorial Edition of her husband’s works.  The Pilgrimage to Al Medinah and Meccah (2 vols.), The Mission to Gelele (2 vols.), and Vikram and the Vampire appeared in 1893, First Footsteps in East Africa in 1894.  The venture, however, proved a failure, so no more volumes were issued.  She published her husband’s Pentameron in 1893, and the Catullus in 1894.

Writing 11th July 1893 to Mrs. E. J. Burton just before a visit to that lady, Lady Burton says—­and it must be borne in mind that her complaint often made her feel very ill—­“Send me a line to tell me what is the nearest Roman Catholic Church to you, as I must drive there first to make all arrangements for Sunday morning to get an early confession, communion and mass (after which I am at liberty for the rest of the day) because, as you know, I have to fast from midnight till I come back, and I feel bad for want of a cup of tea. ...The Life is out to-day.”

The reception accorded to her work by the Press, who, out of regard to Sir Richard’s memory, spoke of it with the utmost kindness, gave Lady Burton many happy hours.  “It is a great pleasure to me,” she says, “to know how kind people are about my book, and how beautifully they speak of darling Richard."[FN#685]