The travellers went away, and Diana was left alone. Even in the heyday of health and life this is seldom desirable. She was alone in the world. So fortunate, so happy, so capable a woman, with “everything that heart could desire,” did her prosperity, her wealth and power, and beautiful surroundings do much for her? I think they did ameliorate her lot to an almost incalculable extent. Shut up in a limited space, in sordid circumstances, poor, with nothing to occupy her active faculties, she would have been like a caged lion. But she had abundance to do--occupations important and valuable and necessary, not the things done for the mere sake occupation which are the lot of so many women, and indeed also of many men. The work of the estate, taken up for the first time for many generations with genuine enthusiasm, exercised all her powers; and as she had the advantage over most reformers of being able actually to execute a great many of the reforms she had planned, her work kept her going as perhaps no other work could have done. A reforming despot, eager to set everything right, and really able in many cases to enact the part of Providence, redress wrongs, and do poetic justice among men,--what position could be more sustaining and encouraging to a vigorous and fanciful soul? Diana’s “work” occupied her like a profession. She was rich, for what use but the good of others? The most extravagant expenditure possible to herself personally, she thought, could not amount to half of her income--though she loved to have beautiful things about her, and to spend liberally with the generous habit of her nature. She never meant to marry, she never meant to save. The next Trelawny who should succeed her would find an unencumbered estate, and an improved one, please God, but hoards of money none. This was the intention of her life. You may believe, if you please, that some disgust of youth with the ordinary arrangements of humanity, some horror of false love, or unforgotten outrage of the heart, was at the bottom of the system upon which she had formed her future existence. But whatever this was, she had surmounted the pain of it, and her imagination had been caught by that ideal of the virgin princess, which had something captivating in it, though it is rarely recognised by the world. Then she had herself been poor, and knew how to give succour and who needed it.