such phrases one tries to describe her; but they go a very little way. I can see her now at the dinner-table at Gosford, sardonically watching a real "fashionable lady" who had arrived in the afternoon and was sitting next Lord Wemyss at the farther end--with a wonderful frizzled head, an infinitesimal waist sheathed in white muslin and blue ribbons, rouged cheeks, a marvelous concatenation of jewels, and a caressing, gesticulating manner meant, at fifty, to suggest the ways of "sweet and twenty." The frizzled head drew nearer and nearer to Lord Wemyss, the fingers flourished and pointed; and suddenly I heard Lady Wemyss's deep voice, meditatively amused, beside me: "Her fingers will be in Frank's eyes soon!" Or again, I see her, stalled beneath the drawing-room table, on all-fours, by her imperious grandchildren, patiently playing "horse" or "cow," till her scandalized daughter-in-law discovered her and ran to her release. Or in her last illness, turning her noble head and faint, welcoming smile to the few friends that were admitted; and finally, in the splendid rest after death, when those of us who had not known her in youth could guess what the beauty of her youth had been. She was an omnivorous and most intelligent reader, and a friend that never failed. Matthew Arnold was very fond of her, and she of him; Laura Lyttelton, who was nearly forty years her junior, loved her dearly and never felt the bar of years; the Master owed much to her affection, and gratefully acknowledged it. The _Commonplace Book_, privately printed after her death, showed the range of interests which had played upon her fresh and energetic mind. It was untrained, I suppose, compared to the woman graduate of to-day. But it was far less tired; and all its adventures were of its own seeking. It was in 1896, not long after the appearance of _George Tressady_, that a conversation in a house on the outskirts of the Lakes suggested to me the main plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale._ The talk turned on the fortunes of that interesting old place, Sizergh Castle, near Kendal, and of the Catholic family to whom it then still belonged, though mortgages and lack of pence were threatening imminently to submerge an ancient stock that had held it unbrokenly, from father to son, through many generations. The relation between such a family--pinched and obscure, yet with its own proud record, and inherited consciousness of an unbroken loyalty to a once persecuted faith--and this modern world of ours struck me as an admirable subject for a novel. I thought about it next day, all through a long railway journey from Kendal to London, and by the time I reached Euston the plot of _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ was more or less clear to me.