me. Yes, she was. She had come over to America on a lecturing tour.

The year 1921, it will be remembered, was a trying one for the
inhabitants of the United States. Every boat that arrived from England
brought a fresh swarm of British lecturers to the country. Novelists,
poets, scientists, philosophers, and plain, ordinary bores; some herd
instinct seemed to affect them all simultaneously. It was like one of
those great race movements of the Middle Ages. Men and women of widely
differing views on religion, art, politics, and almost every other
subject; on this one point the intellectuals of Great Britain were
single-minded, that there was easy money to be picked up on the lecture
platforms of America and that they might just as well grab it as the
next person.

Mrs. Hignett had come over with the first batch of immigrants; for,
spiritual as her writings were, there was a solid streak of business
sense in this woman and she meant to get hers while the getting was
good. She was half way across the Atlantic with a complete itinerary
booked before 90 per cent. of the poets and philosophers
had finished sorting out their clean collars and getting their
photographs taken for the passport.

She had not left England without a pang, for departure had involved
sacrifices. More than anything else in the world she loved her charming
home, Windles, in the county of Hampshire, for so many years the seat
of the Hignett family. Windles was as the breath of life to her. Its
shady walks, its silver lake, its noble elms, the old grey stone of its
walls--these were bound up with her very being. She felt that she
belonged to Windles, and Windles to her. Unfortunately, as a matter of
cold, legal accuracy, it did not. She did but hold it in trust for her