Thus began a happy and fruitful time. We managed to get warm in spite of a treacherous and tardy spring. Guests came to stay with us--Henry James, above all; the Creightons, he then in the first months of that remarkable London episcopate, which in four short years did so much to raise the name and fame of the Anglican Church in London, at least for the lay mind; the Neville Lytteltons, who had been since 1893 our summer neighbors at Stocks; Lord Lytton, then at Cambridge; the Sydney Buxtons; old Oxford friends, and many kinsfolk. The damson blossom along the hedgerows that makes of these northern vales in April a glistening network of white and green, the daffodils and violets, the lilies-of-the-valley in the Brigsteer woods came and went, the _Helbeck_ made steady progress. But we left Levens in May, and it took me another eight months to finish the book. Except perhaps in the case of _Bessie Costrell_, I was never more possessed by a subject, more shut in by it from the outer world. And, though its contemporary success was nothing like so great as that of most of my other books, the response it evoked, as my letters show, in those to whom the book appealed, was deep and passionate. My first anxiety was as to my father, and after we had left England for abroad I was seized with misgivings lest certain passages in the talk of Doctor Friedland, who, it will perhaps be remembered, is made the spokesman in the book of certain points in the _intellectual_ case against Catholicism, should wound or distress him. I, therefore, no sooner reached Italy than I sent for the proofs again, and worked at them as much as fatigue would let me, softening them, and, I think, improving them, too. Then we went on to Florence, and rest, coming home for the book's publication in June. The joy and emotion of it were great. George Meredith, J. M. Barrie, Paul Bourget, and Henry James--the men who at that time stood at the head of my own art--gave the book a welcome that I can never forget. George Meredith wrote: Your _Helbeck of Bannisdale_ held me firmly in the reading and remains with me.... If I felt a monotony during the struggle, it came of your being faithful to your theme--rapt--or you would not have had such power over your reader. I know not another book that shows the classic so distinctly to view.... Yet a word of thanks for Doctor Friedland. He is the voice of spring in the book.