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.