ntains rising in a dark and dismal circle
round that sombre pool below, walling her in from the outer world.

'I am at the bottom of a grave,' she said to herself. 'I am in a living
tomb, from which there is no escape. Forty years! Forty years of
patience and hope, for what? For dreams which may never be realised; for
descendants who may never give me the price of my labours. Yes, I should
like to go to my dear one. I should like to revisit the South of France,
to go on to Italy. I should feel young again amidst that eternal,
unchangeable loveliness. I should forget all I have suffered. But it
cannot be. Not yet, not yet!'

Presently with a smile of concentrated bitterness she repeated the words
'Not yet!'

'Surely at my age it must be folly to dream of the future; and yet I
feel as if there were half a century of life in me, as if I had lost
nothing in either mental or bodily vigour since I came here forty years
ago.'

She rose as she said these words, and began to pace the room, with
quiet, firm step, erect, stately, beautiful in her advanced years as she
had been in her bloom and freshness, only with another kind of
beauty--an empress among women. The boast that she had made to herself
was no idle boast. At sixty-seven years of age her physical powers
showed no signs of decay, her mental qualities were at their best and
brightest. Long years of thought and study had ripened and widened her
mind. She was a woman fit to be the friend and counsellor of statesmen,
the companion and confidant of her sovereign: and yet fate willed that
she should be buried alive in a Westmoreland valley, seeing the same
hills and streams, the same rustic faces, from year's end to year's end.
Surely it was a hard fate, a heavy penance, albeit self-imposed.

Lesbia went straight from Scotland to Paris with Sir George and Lady
Kirkbank. Here they stayed at the Bristol for just two days, during
which her hostess went all over the fashionable quarter buying clothes
for the Cannes campaign, and assisting Lesbia to spend the hundred
pounds which her grandmother had sent her for the replenishment of her
well-provided wardrobe. It is astonishing how little way a hundred
pounds goes among the dressmakers, corset-makers, and shoemakers of
Lutetia.

'I had no notion that clothes were so dear,' said Lesbia, when she saw
how little she had got for her money.

'My dear, you have two gowns which are absolutely _chien_,' replied Lady
Kirkbank, 'an