But the new novel owed not only much of its scenery and setting, but also its main incident, to the new house. We first entered into negotiation for Stocks in January, 1892. In the preceding December two gamekeepers had been murdered on the Stocks property, in a field under a big wood, not three hundred yards from the house; and naturally the little community, as it lay in its rural quiet beneath its wooded hills, was still, when we first entered it, under the shock and excitement of the tragedy. We heard all the story on the spot, and then viewed it from another point of view--the sociopolitical--when we went down from London to stay at one of the neighboring country-houses, in February, and found the Home Secretary, Mr. Matthews, afterward Lord Llandaff, among the guests. The trial was over, the verdict given, and the two murderers were under sentence of death. But there was a strong agitation going on in favor of a reprieve; and what made the discussion of it, in this country-house party, particularly piquant was that the case, at that very moment, was a matter of close consultation between the judge and the Home Secretary. It was not easy, therefore, to talk of it in Mr. Matthews's presence. Voices dropped and groups dissolved when he appeared. Mr. Asquith, who succeeded Mr. Matthews that very year as Home Secretary, was also, if I remember right, of the party; and there was a good deal of rather hot discussion of the game laws, and of English landlordism in general. With these things in my mind, as soon as we had settled into Stocks, I began to think of _Marcella_. I wrote the sketch of the book in September, 1892, and finished it in February, 1894. Many things went to the making of it--not only the murdered keepers and the village talk, not only the remembered beauty of Hampden which gave me the main setting of the story, but a general ferment of mind, connected with much else that had been happening to me.