When she said some complimentary words about my work with her son, I could not refrain from saying that I had done my best to prepare myself for it by having my shoes carefully blacked. She laughed, and said, “I could not find fault with your Latin and Greek, Mr. Trollope. And would it not be better if people always confined their criticism to what they _do_ understand?” I was living during these months in Little Marlborough Street, in a house kept by a tailor and his mother. It was a queer house, disconnected with the row of buildings in which it stood, a survival of some earlier period. It stood in its own court, by which it was separated from the street. I found all the place transmogrified when I visited it a year or two ago. During the latter part of my residence there the lodgings were shared by my brother Anthony, who, as related by himself, had accepted a place in the secretary’s office in the Post Office. The lodgings were very cheap, more so I think than the goodness of them might have justified. We were the only lodgers; and the cheapness of the rooms was, I suspect, in some degree caused by the fact that the majority of young men lodgers would not have tolerated the despotic rule of our old landlady, the tailor’s mother. She made us very comfortable; but her laws were many, and of the nature of those of the Medes and Persians. Meantime matters were becoming more and more gloomy in the Château d’Hondt, outside the St. Peter’s Gate, at Bruges. My brother Henry had returned thither from Devonshire; and his condition was unmistakably becoming worse. While I was still living in Little Marlborough Street, my mother came over hurriedly to London, bringing him and my sister Emily with her. They travelled by boat from Ostend to London to avoid the land journey, I take it poor Henry was led to suppose that the journey was altogether caused by the necessity of interviews between my mother and her publishers. But the real motive of it was to obtain the best medical advice for him and (as, alas! it began to appear to be necessary) for my sister Emily. All kinds of schemes of southern travel, and voyages to Madeira, &c., had been proposed for Henry, who, having himself, with the hopefulness peculiar to his malady, no shadow of a doubt of his own recovery, entered into them all with the utmost zest. A kind friend, I forget by what means or interest, had offered to provide free passages to Madeira. Alas! the first consultation with the medical authorities put an end to all such schemes. And my poor mother had the inexpressibly sad and difficult task of quashing them all without allowing her patient to suspect the real reason of their being given up. She had to take him back to Bruges; and I accompanied them to the boat lying off the Tower, and remained with them an hour before it weighed anchor. And then and there I took the last leave of my brother Henry, I well knowing, he never imagining, that it was for ever.