But before 1808 set in, Sarah’s strength seemed to be establishing itself in the kindly foreign air; in that and in her growing happiness her husband began to reap the moral reward he had so hardly won. Abruptly, and not without alarm, the English in Sicily were driven homewards by the descent of the French on those shores. Captain and Mrs. Sturgeon hurried aboard a crowded transport bound for Portsmouth. The poor lady had great excitement and considerable hardship to undergo, and in the course of that most luckless voyage was prematurely born her only child. The deep-seated sadness of her soul, as if unjustly alienated from her, returned in all its fulness after his death. She settled with her husband at Hythe in Kent, and there she made haste to die. The laburnums were coming into blossom when she entered upon her eternity, six-and-twenty years old. She had a meek request to make of her father, who was oftentimes as near to her new home as London: it was that she might be buried in a garden grave at the Priory, where the sister who died in childhood had been laid. One need have no very romantic imagination to guess that the remote green spot bordering the lawn (a natural trysting-place screened by great trees that grow near the little grave), was dear to her also for another’s sake, for some old association with him who loved her in his hunted youth. For his own reasons, Mr. Curran, approached on the subject, saw fit to refuse. During the first week of May, 1808, Sir Charles Napier thus wrote his mother: “I rode over to Hythe this morning to see poor Sturgeon, who has lost his little wife at last, the betrothed of Emmet. Young Curran is here: his sister was gone before his arrival. They are going to take the body to Ireland.” It was Richard Curran, faithful in every human relationship, who went on to his brother-in-law. The bereaved two brought Sarah home to her own country, to the tomb in Newmarket of the grandmother of whom she had been fond, and for whom she was named: Sarah Philpot. The headstone was prepared, and seen by some local antiquary, and remembered; but it disappeared before it was placed. Emmet’s love sleeps, like Emmet, without an epitaph. The letter which Richard Curran wrote to “M.” about his dead sister was printed by her twenty-three years after. In it was enclosed a fragment of Sarah’s own:— “RADISH’S HOTEL, ST. JAMES’S STREET, “LONDON, _May 8, 1808_.