I confided it to Lord Acton a little while afterward. We discussed it, and he cordially encouraged me to work it out. Then I consulted my father, my Catholic father, without whose assent I should never have written the book at all; and he raised no difficulty. So I only had to begin. But I wanted a setting--somewhere in the border country between the Lakes mountains and Morecambe Bay. And here another piece of good luck befell, almost equal to that which had carried us to Hampden for the summer of 1889. Levens Hall, it appeared, was to be let for the spring--the famous Elizabethan house, five miles from Kendal, and about a mile from Sizergh. I had already seen Levens; and we took the chance at once. Bannisdale in the novel is a combination, I suppose, of Sizergh and Levens. The two houses, though of much the same date, are really very different, and suggest phases of life quite distinct from each other. Levens compared to Sizergh is--or was then, before the modern restoration of Sizergh--the spoiled beauty beside the shabby ascetic. Levens has always been cared for and lived in by people who had money to spend upon the house and garden they loved, and the result is a wonderful example of Elizabethan and Jacobean decoration, mellowed by time into a perfect whole. Yet, for my purposes, there was always Sizergh, close by, with its austere suggestions of sacrifice and suffering under the penal laws, borne without flinching by a long succession of quiet, simple, undistinguished people. We arrived there in March, 1897. The house greeted us on a clear and chilly evening under the mingled light of a frosty sunset, and the blaze of wood fires which had been lit everywhere to warm its new guests. At last we arrived--saw the wonderful gray house rising above the river in the evening light, found G---- waiting at the open door for us, and plunged into the hall, the sitting-rooms, and all the intricacies of the upper passages and turrets with the delight and curiosity of a pack of children. Wood and peat fires were burning everywhere; the great chimneypieces in the drawing-room, the arms of Elizabeth over the hall fire, the stucco birds and beasts running round the Hall, showed dimly in the scanty lamplight (we shall want about six more lamps!)--and the beauty of the marvelous old place took us all by storm. Then through endless passages and kitchens, bright with long rows of copper pans and molds, we made our way out into the gardens among the clipped yews and cedars, and had just light enough to see that Levens apparently is like nothing else but itself. ... The drawback of the house at present is certainly _the cold_!