To make up for this, whenever she was ill, which didn't often happen--except, of course, when she had a baby--he forgot all his writing in his anxiety about her; and in his care of her, and his solicitude for her ease and comfort, he became quite a motherly old woman, a better nurse than Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Gibson--as practical and sensible and full of authority as Dr. Knight himself. And when it was all over, all his amiable carelessness came back, and with it his genius, his school-boy high spirits, his tomfooling, his romps with his children, and his utter irresponsibility, and absolute disdain for all the ordinary business of life; and the happy, genial temper that never seemed to know a moment's depression or nourish an unkind thought. Poor Barty! what would he have done without us all, and what should we have done without Barty? As Scatcherd said of him, "He's having his portion in this life." But it was not really so. Then, in 1870, he bought that charming house, Mansfield, by the Thames, which he rechristened Marsfield; and which he--with the help of the Scatcherds and myself, for it became our hobby--made into one of the most delightful abodes in England. It was the real home for all of us; I really think it is one of the loveliest spots on earth. It was a bargain, but it cost a lot of money; altogether, never was money better spent--even as a mere investment. When I think of what it is worth now! Je suis homme d'affaires! What a house-warming that was on the very day that France and Germany went to war; we little guessed what was to come for the country we all loved so dearly, or we should not have been so glad. I am conscious that all this is rather dull reading. Alas! Merry England is a devilish dull place compared to foreign parts--and success, respectability, and domestic bliss are the dullest things to write--or read--about that I know--and with middle age to follow too! It was during that first summer at Marsfield that Barty told me the extraordinary story of Martia, and I really thought he had gone mad. For I knew him to be the most truthful person alive. Even now I hardly know what to think, nor did Leah--nor did Barty himself up to the day of his death. He showed me all her letters, _which I may deem it advisable to publish some day_: not only the Blaze suggestions for his books, and all her corrections; things to occupy him for life--all, of course, in his own handwriting; but many letters about herself, also written in sleep and by his own hand; and the style is Barty's--not the style in which he wrote his books, and which is not to be matched; but that in which he wrote his Blaze letters to me. If her story is true--and I never read a piece of documentary evidence more convincing--these letters constitute the most astonishing revelation ever yet vouchsafed to this earth. But her story cannot be true!