organism is still weak, but it lives. And the forces behind it are, indefinitely, mysteriously stronger than its adversaries think." In this mood it was that, when the book came out in the autumn of 1900, I prefixed to it the dedication--"To Italy, the beloved and beautiful, Instructress of our past, Delight of our present, Comrade of our future, the heart of an Englishwoman offers this book." "_Comrade of our future_." As one looks out to-day upon the Italian fighting-line, where English troops are interwoven with those of Italy and France for the defense of the Lombard and Venetian plain against the attack of Italy's old and bitter enemy, an attack in which are concerned not only the fortunes of Italy, but those also of the British Empire, I wonder what touch of prophecy, what whisper from a far-off day, suggested these words written eighteen years ago? EPILOGUE And here, for a time at least, I bring these _Recollections_ to an end with the century in which I was born, and my own fiftieth year. Since _Eleanor_ appeared, and my father died, eighteen years have gone--years for me of constant work, literary and other. On the one hand, increasing interest in and preoccupation with politics, owing to personal links and friendships, and a life spent, as to half the year, in London, have been reflected in my books; and on the other, the English rural scene, with its country houses and villages, its religion, and its elements of change and revolution, has been always at my home gates, as a perpetually interesting subject. Old historic situations, also, have come to life for me again in new surroundings, as in _Lady Rose's Daughter_, _The Marriage of William Ashe_, and _Fenwick's Career;_ in _Richard Meynell_ I attempted the vision of a Church of England recreated from within, with a rebel, and not--as in _Robert Elsmere_--an exile, for a hero; _Lady Connie_ is a picture of Oxford as I saw her in my youth, as faithful as I can now make it; _Eltham House_ is a return to the method of _William Ashe_, and both _Lady Connie_ and _Missing_ have been written since the war. _Missing_ takes for its subject a fragment from the edge of that vast upheaval which no novel of real life in future will be able to leave out of its ken. In the first two years of the war, the cry both of writers and public--so far as the literature of imagination was concerned--tended to be--"anything but the war"! There was an eager wish in both, for a time, in the first onrush of the great catastrophe, to escape from it and the newspapers, into the world behind it. That world looks to us now as the Elysian fields looked to Aeneas as he approached them from the heights--full not only of souls in a blessed calm, but of those also who had yet to make their way into existence as it terribly _is_, had still to taste reality and pain. We were thankful, for a time, to go back to that kind, unconscious, unforeseeing world. But it is no longer possible. The war has become our