A sudden idea came over me.  Mr. Benjamin Yolland was in dire want of a lady as reference to a parish woman for his Hydriots.  I had begun, but had been called away.  Miss Woolmer had tried, but was not well enough, and there was no one else whom he thought capable.  I was to stay at Arked for six weeks more; should I put Viola in the way?  It would be work for him.

She caught at it.  Lady Diana bridled a little as she thought of the two young men who managed the Hydriots, but the doctor’s prescription recurred to her mind, and she consented.

Need I tell you how dear Aunt Viola’s soul and spirit have gone forth with those Hydriot people, how from going once a week to meet the parish woman at Miss Woolmer’s, she soon came to presiding at the mothers’ meetings, to knowing everybody, and giving more and more of her time, her thoughts, her very self to them and being loved by them enormously.  The spirit, fun, and enterprise that were in her fitted her, as they began to revive, for dealing with the lads, who were sure to be devoted to anything so pretty and refined.  When she began, the whisper that she was the love of their hero, gave them a romantic interest, and though with the younger generation this is only a tradition, yet “our lady” has won ground of her own, and is still fair and sweet enough to be looked on by those youths as a sort of flower of the whole world, yet their own peculiar property.  For is she not a Hydriot shareholder, and does she not like to know that it was to Harold’s revival of those shares that she chiefly owes her present means?  Since her mother’s death she has lived among them at the house that was old Miss Woolmer’s, and is tranquilly happy in finding happiness for other people, and always being ready when any one needs her, as our dear old uncle does very often, though I think her Hydriot boys have the most of her.

Hippolyta made Eustace a good wife, and watched over him well; but there was no preventing his deficiency from increasing; it became acknowledged disease of the brain, and he did not survive his cousin six years.  Happily none of his feebleness of intellect seems to have descended to Eustace the third, who is growing up a steady, sensible lad under his mother’s management; and perhaps it is not the worse for Arghouse to have become a Horsman dependency.

It was the year before Eustace’s death that the conductress of the school at Baden wrote to Mrs. Alison about Dora.  The sad state of her brother had prevented her coming home or being visited, and though I exchanged letters with her periodically, we had not sufficient knowledge of one another for any freedom of expression after she had conquered the difficulties of writing.

When she was a little more than sixteen, came a letter to tell that she was wasting away in either atrophy or consumption, and that the doctors said the only hope for her was home and native air.  Poor child! what home was there for her, with her sister-in-law absorbed in the care of her brother, whose imbecility was no spectacle for one in a critical state of health and failing spirits?  We were at Arked at the time, and offered to go and fetch her (it was Dermot’s kind thought), leaving the children to Viola’s care.