Having spent the winter months of 1894 (from January to April) in Egypt, I was returning thence in the latter month with my friend Mrs Judge of Windsor. Our route was _via_ Paris, and I had arranged to spend a week there in the same hotel as the young Swedish lady whom I first met in India, and who has been referred to more than once in this record. She told me she had made the acquaintance that winter of the famous "Countess of Caithness and Duchesse de Pomar," and thinking it would interest me to meet this lady, she had asked for permission to introduce me to her. As it turned out, Madame Bruegel was unable to accompany me to the house, having several engagements for the afternoon, but she promised to "put in an appearance" later. So Mrs Judge and I drove off to the well-known mansion in the Avenue de Wagram, and were received very cordially by Lady Caithness. I had once tried to read a very abstruse and mystic book by this lady, and had heard her spoken of as a more or less hopeless lunatic, "who imagined herself Mary Queen of Scots," and so forth. Otherwise I went without prejudice, and being accustomed to judge for myself in such matters, came to the conclusion that Lady Caithness was an extremely shrewd woman, with her head remarkably "well screwed on," as the saying is. As regards her claims to be Mary Queen of Scots, I never heard these from her own lips, although I saw her daily for a week, and we had many interesting talks. She certainly _did_ claim to be in very close relations with the ill-fated Queen of Scotland, but I do not know what views she may have held privately as to varied manifestations of the one spirit. I have heard Lord Monkswell propound an interesting theory, with Archdeacon Wilberforce in the chair, to the effect that as one short earth life gave small scope for spiritual experience and development, he thought it quite possible that the same spirit might have several bodily manifestations simultaneously, and that the judge and the criminal might conceivably be one and the same individual in two personalities! It is possible that Lady Caithness may have had some such view, not theoretically (as was the case with Lord Monkswell), but as a matter of conviction, and apart from the limits of Time and Space involved in the conception of the latter. I can only say that I never heard her speak of Mary Queen of Scots except as an entity, quite distinct from herself. But that she carried the "Marie" _culte_ to great extremes is an undoubted fact. The hall and rooms on the ground floor of the Avenue Wagram House were arranged and furnished in close imitation of Holyrood Palace. I counted over fifty miniatures and other pictures of the Scottish Queen in the Countess's beautiful bedroom alone, and later on shall have to speak more definitely of one life size and exquisitely painted portrait of the Queen. But to return to this first reception.