After driving about half-a-mile Mr. Crawford halted in a little lane leading out of the high road, and within five minutes' walk of Hyde Park,--an obscure corner, in which one would scarcely expect to find a decent house, but which was, nevertheless, one of the choicest spots at the West-end. It was close to the park; and the maximum of earthly bliss seems to be involved in that fact. The painter alighted before a stout wooden door, set deep in a wall, above which appeared the branches of leafless sycamores. The garden within that circling wall was rather less than half-an-acre in extent: the house that nestled amid those leafless trees was only a cottage; but the rent which Mrs. Champernowne paid for this retreat was something like seven hundred a-year. It was a retreat--a little hermitage half hidden amidst a dreary wilderness of stucco--a pearl of price amongst the meretricious splendours of Birmingham jewellers' ware--a place, whose parallel was not to be found within the charmed circle in which alone Mrs. Champernowne could exist--and Mrs. Champernowne's landlord knew the value of his treasure. Such a cottage and such a garden at Highgate, or Kew, or Ealing, or Isleworth, might have been worth a hundred and fifty pounds a-year: but such a cottage, within ear-shot of the sparrows of Hyde Park, was worth almost any thing its owner chose to ask for it. Mrs. Champernowne was elegant, Mrs. Champernowne was fashionable. She was a widow--the widow of an elderly man, who had left her what was supposed to be an inexhaustible fortune. But it may be that this idea had arisen in the public mind rather from the reckless expenditure of the widow than from any exact knowledge of the late Mr. Champernowne's resources. With this gentleman had expired one unutterably ancient lineage, and in the person of his widow was represented another. Backward, through the misty regions of the past, Mrs. Champernowne traced the currents of her own and her husband's blood, winding, by separate ways, into the remote darkness of a legendary age. The history of modern Europe had a personal interest for the elegant widow, and Froissart was a family record. But she rarely spoke of these past glories. Only now and then, when the name of some aristocratic conspirator or court-poet, some distinguished politician, or general, or admiral of a mediæval age arose in a discussion, Mrs. Champernowne might be heard to murmur softly, as to herself, "His great grandson married my mother's great aunt;" or, "Poor fellow, how fond my ancestor Ralph Hyde's youngest daughter was of him! I have the ring he gave her the night before his execution,--a posy ring with the motto, _Memoria in æterna_."