The world is very drab to-day, as I look out of my bedroom window at the Hall and once more open the book in which I set down the experiences of my pilgrimage. I am living in luxury again, a luxury which has, alas! more of permanency in it than before. The little room in which I am writing is charming in the daintiness of its colouring and the simplicity of its furnishings. There is just a suspicion of pink in the creamy wallpaper, and the deeper cream of the woodwork. The bed, like the dressing table and the chairs, is in satinwood, beautifully inlaid, and the wardrobe is an enormous cavern in the wall, with mirrored doors behind which my few belongings hang suspended like ghostly stalactites. The floor is nearly covered with a Wilton rug, and the rest of it is polished until it looks like glass. A few choice etchings and engravings hang upon the walls--Elaine dreaming of Lancelot, Dante bending over the dead body of Beatrice, Helen of Troy, and similar subjects, with two of Leader's landscapes. The counterpane gleams, snowy white, beneath the lovely satin eider-down, which gives a splash of colour to the room; and the room is _mine_! Mine! Yes, but the world is very drab all the same. The sky is grey to its farthest limits--an unrelieved greyness which presses upon one's spirits. The landscape is grey, with no solitary touch of brightness in it until you come to the lawn in front of my window, where there is a gorgeous display of chrysanthemums. The cawing of the rooks is a shade more mournful than usual, and the grey smoke from the stacks above my head floats languidly on the heavy air. And for the moment I would have it so, for it harmonises with my mood and gives me the inspiration I need in order to write down the occurrences of these later days. It is not that I am morbid or downcast; I am sad, but not depressed; the outlook is not black--it is just drab. I suppose if anyone were to read what I have written thus far they would guess the truth--that my dear old Mother Hubbard has been taken from me. We laid her to rest a week ago in the little plot of ground which must ever henceforward be very dear to me, and my heart hungers for the sound of her voice and the sight of her kindly face. But I cannot doubt that for her it is "far better," so I will not stoop to self-pity. And, after all, there is not a streak of grey in the picture I have to reproduce. As I live over again those few last days of companionship I feel the curtains to be drawn back from the windows of my soul; I experience the freshness of a heaven-born zephyr. I find myself smiling as one only smiles when memory is pleasing and there is deep content, and I say to myself: "Thank God, it was indeed 'sunset and evening star' and there was no 'moaning of the bar' when the spirit of the gentle motherkin 'put out to sea,' and she went forth to meet her 'Pilot face to face.'"