It was from her in the first instance that I learned all that she knew of the family history: How my lord was a brute and libertine, who had done his wife to death, and was hated and feared of all, unless, perhaps, by the old dirty astrologer on the hill, who was his kinsman and Naboth and defier in one, holding the “Folly” in fee simple, as he did, from a scientific ancestor, and persistently refusing to be coaxed or bought out of it. How my lady, as pious as her brother was worldly, had embraced the Romish doctrine many years before, and had not scrupled, on the Jesuit principle, to procure herself through his most questionable political relations a virtual exemption from the penalties which attached to the open exercise of her religion. How, trading on this connection, she had planted in Wellcot-Herring a community of the “Sisters of Perpetual Invocation,” whose munificent patroness and dupe (Heaven forgive me! They were certainly very plausible little sybarites) she had constituted herself. How the honourable Mr. Rowe, his lordship’s younger brother, was suspected of royal blood in his veins, and was only spared the scandal of proof so long as his nephew, the Viscount Salted, kept him out of the succession. How, in fine,--and this was where my interest was most intimately engaged,--her ladyship had once had an _affaire de cœur_ with a Mr. de Crespigny, an artist, who came to paint her portrait, and who left it on the canvas half finished, being given, it was whispered, his congé in reluctant return for his insensibility to the proselytising advances of his sitter. From little Patty I extracted all this _chronique scandaleuse_, and if she enlightened me in her own inimitable bashful way, blundering prettily on the truth out of innocence, I was not so backward even then as to be imposed upon by half-revelations, or to refrain from construing them on my own account into the language of experience. And so I entered on my new life, having, to endear its strangeness, and soon, alas! its monotony to me, the most loving, simple-minded little comrade one might imagine. From the first my position, like my friend’s, was undefined. We were not adopted daughters, or servants, or companions to madam, but a sort of pious pensioners on her bounty. She claimed some personal menial duties of us, which might be likened to those exacted of ladies of a royal bed-chamber. As was befitting with so great a princess, we might approach and handle her, but reverently as one might uncover a reliquary of sanctified bones. And, indeed, she was little else. For myself, I did not much care. My eyes and ears served me for all her case, howsoever little of her intimacy was vouchsafed me.