young Swedish lady whom I first met in
India, and who has been referred to more than once in this record.

She told me she had made the acquaintance that winter of the famous
"Countess of Caithness and Duchesse de Pomar," and thinking it would
interest me to meet this lady, she had asked for permission to introduce
me to her.

As it turned out, Madame Bruegel was unable to accompany me to the house,
having several engagements for the afternoon, but she promised to "put
in an appearance" later. So Mrs Judge and I drove off to the well-known
mansion in the Avenue de Wagram, and were received very cordially by
Lady Caithness.

I had once tried to read a very abstruse and mystic book by this lady,
and had heard her spoken of as a more or less hopeless lunatic, "who
imagined herself Mary Queen of Scots," and so forth.

Otherwise I went without prejudice, and being accustomed to judge for
myself in such matters, came to the conclusion that Lady Caithness was
an extremely shrewd woman, with her head remarkably "well screwed on,"
as the saying is. As regards her claims to be Mary Queen of Scots, I
never heard these from her own lips, although I saw her daily for a
week, and we had many interesting talks.

She certainly _did_ claim to be in very close relations with the
ill-fated Queen of Scotland, but I do not know what views she may have
held privately as to varied manifestations of the one spirit. I have
heard Lord Monkswell propound an interesting theory, with Archdeacon
Wilberforce in the chair, to the effect that as one short earth life
gave small scope for spiritual experience and development, he thought it
quite possible that the same spirit might have several bodily
manifestations simultaneously, and that the judge and the criminal might
conceivably be one and the same individual in two personalities!

It is possible that Lady Caithness may have had some such view, not
theoretically (as was the case with Lord Monkswell), but as a matter of
conviction, and apart from the limits of Time and Space involved in the
conception of the latter.

I can only say that I never heard her speak of Mary Queen of Scots
except as an entity, quite distinct from herself. But that she carried
the "Marie" _culte_ to great extremes is an undoubted fact. The hall and
rooms on the ground floor of the Avenue Wagram House were arranged and
furnished in close imitation of Holyrood Palace. I counted over fifty
miniatures and other pictures