'I often, in imagination, pass over a long lapse of years,' said Byron, 'and console myself for present privations, in anticipating the time when my daughter will know me by reading my works; for, though the hand of prejudice may conceal my portrait from her eyes,[9] it cannot hereafter conceal my thoughts and feelings, which will talk to her when he to whom they belonged has ceased to exist. The triumph will then be mine; and the tears that my child will drop over expressions wrung from me by mental agony--the certainty that she will enter into the sentiments which dictated the various allusions to her and to myself in my works--consoles me in many a gloomy hour.' This prophecy was amply fulfilled. It appears that, after Ada's marriage to Lord King, Colonel Wildman met her in London, and invited her to pay him a visit at Newstead Abbey. One morning, while Ada was in the library, Colonel Wildman took down a book of poems. Ada asked the name of the author of these poems, and when shown the portrait of her father--Phillips's well-known portrait--which hung upon the wall, Ada remained for a moment spell-bound, and then remarked ingenuously: 'Please do not think that it is affectation on my part when I declare to you that I have been brought up in complete ignorance of all that concerns my father.' Never until that moment had Ada seen the handwriting of her father, and, as we know, even his portrait had been hidden from her. When Byron's genius was revealed to his daughter, an enthusiasm for his memory filled her soul. She shut herself up for hours in the rooms which Byron had used, absorbed in all the glory of one whose tenderness for her had been so sedulously concealed by her mother. On her death-bed she dictated a letter to Colonel Wildman, begging that she might be buried at Hucknall-Torkard, in the same vault as her illustrious father. And there they sleep the long sleep side by side--separated during life, united in death--the prophecy of 1816 fulfilled in 1852: 'Yet, though dull Hate as duty should be taught, I know that thou wilt love me; though my name Should be shut from thee, as a spell still fraught With desolation, and a broken claim: Though the grave closed between us,--'twere the same, I know that thou wilt love me; though to drain _My_ blood from out thy being were an aim And an attainment,--all would be in vain,-- Still thou wouldst love me, still that more than life retain.' CHAPTER V