They were women to whom he had ever been kind, but to whom he had never opened his heart.

When, in the midst of the stunning sorrow of the first week, he tried to think of all this, it seemed to him that there was nobody.
There had been one lady, a very dear ally, staying in the house with them when the Duchess died.

This was Mrs.Finn, the wife of Phineas Finn, who had been one of the Duke's colleagues when in office.
How it had come to pass that Mrs.Finn and the Duchess had become singularly bound together has been told elsewhere.

But there had been close bonds,--so close that when the Duchess on their return from the Continent had passed through London on her way to Matching, ill at the time and very comfortless, it had been almost a thing of course, that Mrs.Finn should go with her.

And as she had sunk, and then despaired, and then died, it was this woman who had always been at her side, who had ministered to her, and had listened to the fears and the wishes and hopes she had expressed respecting the children.
At Matching, amidst the ruins of the old Priory, there is a parish burying-ground, and there, in accordance with her own wish, almost within sight of her own bedroom-window, she was buried.