It was amid a scene to which these lines might be applied, that Lord Sandilands and his daughter were living, a year after the death of Gilbert Lloyd--a scene so grand, and yet so full of soft and tender beauty, that an English writer, who knew it better than anyone except the native Swiss dwellers in it, declared it to be, "even amongst the wonders of the Alps, a very miracle of beauty." It was a nook in the Savoy Alps, near the Valley of the Sixt. It had needed both money and interest to enable the old English nobleman to make even a temporary "settlement" in the remote region; but he had used both to good purpose, when he found that the wounded spirit, the mind diseased, of his daughter were not to be healed by the distractions of travelling in the busy and populous centres of European life. They had tried many places, but she had sickened of all, though she tried hard to hide from her father--whose solicitude for her increased daily, as did her affection for him--that all his efforts to procure peace and pleasure for her were to a great extent ineffectual. The young English _prima donna_--whose brief and brilliant career, whose sudden, unexplained disappearance from the scene of her triumphs, had been the subject of much talk and many conjectures in London--was not identified on the Continent with the Miss Keith who kept so much to herself, but who was so very charming when she could be induced to enter into the pastime of the hour. This was the more natural, as Gertrude never exerted her greatest, her most characteristic, talent--she never sang after she left England The last occasion on which she had "tumbled," as she had said, to a limited but critical audience at Hardriggs, was the last appearance of Miss Lambert on any stage. Miss Keith looked well, when he was to be seen, and talked well, when she could be heard; but she never sang, and thus a kindly mist diffused itself over her identity.