They were indeed lovers to the end. He had waited and served for her eight years in his youth, and her sunny, affectionate nature, with its veins both of humor and of stoicism, gave her man of genius exactly what he wanted. She survived him for many years, living her own life at Eastbourne, climbing Beachy Head in all weathers, interested in everything, and writing poems of little or no technical merit, but raised occasionally by sheer intensity of feeling--about her husband--into something very near the real thing. I quote these lines from a privately printed volume she gave me: If you were here,--and I were where you lie, Would you, beloved, give your little span Of life remaining unto tear and sigh? No!--setting every tender memory Within your breast, as faded roses kept For giver's sake, of giver when bereft, Still to the last the lamp of work you'd burn For purpose high, nor any moment spurn. So, as you would have done, I fain would do In poorer fashion. Ah, how oft I try, Try to fulfil your wishes, till at length The scent of those dead roses steals my strength. As to our other guests, to what company would not Sir Alfred Lyall have added that touch of something provocative and challenging which draws men and women after it, like an Orpheus-music? I can see him sitting silent, his legs crossed, his white head bent, the corners of his mouth drooping, his eyes downcast, like some one spent and wearied, from whom all virtue had gone out. Then some one, a man he liked--but still oftener a woman--would approach him, and the whole figure would wake to life--a gentle, whimsical, melancholy life, yet possessed of a strange spell and pungency. Brooding, sad and deep, seemed to me to hold his inmost mind. The fatalism and dream of those Oriental religions to which he had given so much of his scholar's mind had touched him profoundly. His poems express it in mystical and somber verse, and his volumes of _Asiatic Studies_ contain the intellectual analysis of that background of thought from which the poems spring.