the title Defender
of the Faith. The first man to receive it had been Henry VIII and the
words are still engraved on the coins of England. The secular press
would not print the telegram in full because it bestowed upon a
subject a royal title.

After Gilbert's death Frances tried to take up life again. She
visited her cousins in Germany, a university professor and his
English wife, who were undergoing the persecution of the Swastika.
She was deeply moved by their suffering and the peril they stood in.

Home again she surrounded herself more than ever with children,
taking a Catechism class and encouraging her small scholars to come
to Top Meadow where her garden also helped her towards a difficult
peace and serenity, rendered harder by the struggle with ill health.
Soon we began to realise that the physical weakness, which all her
courage could not overcome, was more than merely her old malady.
"What did Frances die of?" Bernard Shaw wrote to me. "Was it of
widowhood?"

In fact it was a most painful cancer heroically endured. She was
cared for by Dorothy and presently by the nuns of the Bon Secours.
Her friends visited her as they were allowed. Father Vincent McNabb,
after a talk of almost an hour, noted how never once did she speak of
herself or of her suffering.

Her concerns were for Dorothy, for the Church, and for Gilbert's
memory; Eric Gill's monument, the biography, the permanence of his
own writing. She survived him little more than two years. Near the
end, from the face of a dying woman shrunken with pain, we still
could see those "great heavenly eyes that seem to make the truth at
the heart of things almost too terribly simple and naked for the sons
of flesh."*

[* Letter from Gilbert, see [Chapter VIII].]

APPENDIX A

AN EARLIER CHESTERTON

BOTH THE _Autobiography_ and _Prison Life_ of George Laval Chesterton
are worth reading. There is conscious humour: we feel it might be our
own Chesterton when we hear the Captain describing himself as
"laughing immoderately" because he had made a fool of himself and
others were laughing at him. There is unconscious humour, especially
in the astonishing style, full of such phrases as "I was the most
obnoxious to peril," or "something not far removed from impunity
stalked abroad."

Captain Chesterton started life as a soldier. During the Peninsular
War his regiment was stationed at Cartagena. "It was a subject of
deep mortification to most of us to be