“OUR Queen” she was to me and Ronald, ever since we first met her at Broadwater, and Ronald had dared to love her. And now that she is gone from us there is little fear that her title will ever be questioned. Neither he nor I need any coarser picture of her than that engraved by memory. But for others—for those who knew her little, or less well—let me try to call her back in clearer and less shadowy outline. A woman this, to whom you gave your confidence with your first greeting, and never afterwards withdrew it. Not the face to tempt an artist by its regularity of feature or beauty of colouring. Madonna-like some would call it, and so it was in sweet and loving trustfulness, but far too mobile and human, too full of interest and human sympathy to suggest the reposeful placidity of conventional art. Instinct, rather, with the life and animation that inspires the best work of Gainsborough and Reynolds, and frank with a simplicity that is careless of its surroundings, and therefore conquers them. The centre of her interest was home; thence it radiated outwards. From her family to her friends, from friends to neighbours, her influence passed in ever widening circles like a ripple that, stirred in the centre of some pool, travels to the extremest edge. Nature creates not many such. Happy the man who has known and honoured one. Over and over again I have tried to unravel the secret of her inexplicable charm. Seating myself in some sequestered nook, where Ronald himself would find it hard to discover me, it has been my pleasure, through a long evening’s entertainment, to watch her in every graceful word and greeting that she exchanged with her friends. It was a satisfaction even to see her walk across the room—a lost art (they tell us) in these hurried and inartistic days. I tried to learn the mystery from her conversation. The words told nothing, but the tone was less secretive; and, after all, how much more the tone always does tell of the spirit of the speaker than the conventional coinage we have devised in words. “And how’s that sweet little bairn of yours, Mrs. Macpherson?” (She was half Scotch by birth, and now and again her descent betrayed itself in a pretty mannerism of word and accent.) “I lost my heart to her, I did, when I met her yesterday on the Parade with her nurse.” A greeting old as time can make it, but new, entirely new, in the sympathy she threw into it right from the depths of her heart. No one could hear her and not believe; and Mrs. Macpherson was won. Sometimes, almost awestruck, I asked myself, Is there, _can_ there be a human nature so nearly approximating to the divine as to possess the verity of universal sympathy? And, knowing this woman so nearly and so closely as I knew her, it was impossible, I found, to answer the question with a negative.