When Lady Trevelyan married, her husband, whose reading had lain anywhere rather than among the circulating libraries, used at first to wonder who the extraordinary people could be with whom his wife and his brother-in-law appeared to have lived.

This style of thought and conversation had for young minds a singular and a not unhealthy fascination.

Lady Trevelyan's children were brought up among books, (to use the homely simile of an American author), as a stable-boy among horses.

The shelves of the library, instead of frowning on us as we played and talked, seemed alive with kindly and familiar faces.

But death came, and came again, and then all was changed, and changed as in an instant.