Then it was that Mrs. Champernowne came to London, and began to live her own life. For her, who had been so long an exile from society, the laws of society had little weight. She took a house in a fashionable neighbourhood because the neighbourhood was pleasant, rather than because it was fashionable. She sent for one of her nieces, and made the girl a permanent inmate of her house, not because she feared to face society without the protection of a female companion, but because she wished to benefit her sister's child. She rarely went into society. She was never seen at horticultural _fêtes_, or fancy-fairs, races, or lawn-parties; but at the private view of every exhibition of pictures, at the opera, on the first night of a new piece at a fashionable theatre, at a few of the choicer morning concerts in Hanover Square, the initiated recognised Mrs. Champernowne, and pointed her out to uninitiated friends as one of the most elegant women in fashionable London. She was not a dashing woman; no flutter of lace or rustle of silk, no musical tingling of bracelets or bangles, or perfume of jockey club attended her entrance into any public resort. Country cousins, staring at the patrician beauty of West-end belles and the splendour of West-end millinery, were apt to overlook Mrs. Champernowne; but if a connoisseur in the trifles of life had been told to look for the woman whose toilette most successfully combined the extremity of rigid simplicity with the perfection of elegance, he would inevitably have selected the widow. This was the woman who had been one of the first to recognise the genius of William Crawford, who had given him a high price for one of his earliest successes, and who had been pleased to set him down upon the list of her intimates. And this last boon was no small privilege, for Mrs. Champernowne did not crowd her drawing-room with acquaintances of a season's standing. She lived her own life, and she chose her own friends.