She left a great void in my life, and the sensation of being always wanted and tied to one place that I had sometimes felt so keenly hard I would now have given {273} much to feel again. With this old lady died, so far as my acquaintance went, the last of the old world--that old world of leisure and books and gentle courtesy of days when men might wear their gallantry without foolishness, and women knew the value of their sex. Through all those years in which I waited on my aunt I never heard her use a clipped word, or use a sentence not grammatically perfect and beautifully rounded off, and although in the hurry of modern life I sometimes felt impatient when chided for some swallowed pronunciation or ignored g's, I look back upon the years of my life spent in that old-world atmosphere as a very precious memory. After my aunt's death Eltham became intolerable to me, and I took a small country house near Mottingham till I could let my own house. Directly we left Eltham the pretty garden was devastated by relic-hunters, who pulled the place to pieces in obtaining mementoes of "the house where Parnell had lived." The house at Mottingham was damp, and we longed for the sea. For various reasons we had been obliged to relinquish any idea of living in the little house we had finished, with so much pleasure, at Eastbourne, and at last we had removed the few things we had stored there, and in 1887 had finally decided to take the end house of Walsingham Terrace (No. 10), Brighton. Shortly after my aunt's death we went down to live there. The position then was attractive to us: cornfields from one side of the house away up to Shoreham basin and harbour, a waste of hay at the back of the house, an excellent train service and a sufficient distance from Brighton proper to enable us to avoid the crowd. While we were living there people used to walk and drive out to see "Parnell's house," but this was not {274} particularly annoying, as when he was at home we went out early, or late--anyhow, at a time when the average person is kept at home by appetite. Personally, if it was not glaringly inconvenient, I was always rather proud and interested in the popular attention Parnell attracted wherever he went. Here Parnell had the dining-room as his own sitting-room, where he kept the roll-top desk I had given him for all his papers and political work, while down in the basement there was a room in which he had a furnace fitted up, and where we used to burn the crushed ore before assaying it. We spent many hours down there, and I sometimes feared the excessive heat must have been bad for him; but he did not think so, and would become so absorbed in this work that I used to have the greatest difficulty in getting him out for the gallop on his horse President across the Downs, which did him so much good.