My father, all the time of Nellie’s illness, had been hard at work on the final revision of his Lincoln judgment: now the delivery of that was postponed for a little, but not for long. Everyone had to get back normally and naturally to the work and the play and the joy and sorrow of life again, but at the Christmas holidays it was seen how huge a gap had come in the circle which since Martin’s death, twelve years before, had grown up together, critical and devoted and wildly alive. No one, when all were so intent on the businesses in hand, had estimated when a play, for instance, must be written and rehearsed and managed, how largely it was Nellie’s enthusiastic energy that carried things through. So there was no play that Christmas, and the year after four of us, my father and mother and Maggie and I, were in Algiers, another year they were in Florence, and another Maggie and I were in Egypt, and so that particular blaze of young activity of which Christmas holidays had been the type and flower came to an end. Besides we were all getting older, and there was no Nellie; with her death some unrecapturable magic was lost. Of the many intimate friendships of my mother’s life none was closer than that which had ripened during these years at Lambeth with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the late Archbishop. She had constantly been with us in town and at Addington, and now, after Nellie’s death, she made her permanent home with us. Then, when the Lambeth days were over she continued, until my mother’s death, twenty-two years later, to devote her life to her. CHAPTER XII AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL EXCURSION