little. "Very curious--and very desolate, Austin!"

It is now a good many years since we had that conversation--and we have
never had another like it. I must plead guilty to one or two books, but
I manage to save a little of Jenny's work from the clutches of the
clever girl, and old Cartmell is on the shelf--so I get some of his; and
still I dwell in the little Old Priory under the shadow of big Breysgate
on the hill above. Changes have come elsewhere. There are children at
Oxley Lodge; the succession is prosperously--and indeed amply--secured.
Mrs. Jepps has departed this life--stubborn to the last in her protest;
a donor, who was, and insisted on remaining, anonymous, has founded a
Jepps Scholarship at the Institute "as a mark of respect for her
honorable life and consistent high principle"; I am inclined to hope
that Mrs. Jepps is not permitted to know who that donor was. Lady Sarah
is gone, too, and Alison has been promoted to a suffragan bishopric. But
over us at Breysgate no change passes, save the gentle change of the
revolving years--unless it be that with every year Jenny's sway
increases. Down in Catsford they have nicknamed her "The Empress." The
seat of empire is at Breysgate; by her proconsuls she governs the
borough, Oxley, even Fillingford Manor; for though its rigid master has
never become her friend, has no more passed than he has fallen short of
the limits of punctilious courtesy which he accepted, yet in all
business matters he leans more and more on her. So her power spreads,
and will increase yet more when, in due course, Lacey and Margaret take
possession of the Manor. The despotism is veiled; she is only First
Citizen, like Augustus himself. She will grow no richer--"There is more
than enough for them after I am gone"--and pours back into the town and
the countryside all that she receives from them--_panem et
circenses_--and better things than that. The Institute is even such a
model to all institutes as Bindlecombe would have it; his dream of its
broadening into a university is an openly avowed project now. No wonder
that by public subscription they have placed a portrait of her in the
Memorial Hall, facing the picture of Nicholas Driver which she herself
presented. From where she hangs, she can see the old roof of Hatcham
Ford, surrounded and dwarfed by the great buildings that she has
erected. The painter of Jenny's portrait never saw the Eleanor Lacey at
Fillingford Manor--indeed it has gone fr