If you care to come here I should like to see you before you leave England. This is natural, as after all you are my only child and I am growing old. Once you have departed to that far country who knows whether we shall ever meet again in this world?"
Godfrey, a generous-hearted and forgiving person, was much touched when he read these words, and wrote at once to say that if it were convenient, he would come down to Monk's Abbey at the beginning of the following week and spend some of his leave there. So, in due course, he went.
As it happened, at about the same time Destiny had arranged that another character in this history was returning to that quiet Essex village, namely Isobel Blake.
Isobel went to Mexico with her uncle and there had a most interesting time. She studied Aztec history with her usual thoroughness; so well, indeed, that she became a recognised authority on the subject. She climbed Popocatepetl, the mysterious "Sleeping Woman" that overhands the ancient town, and looked into its crater. Greatly daring, she even visited Yucatan and saw some of the pre-Aztec remains. For this adventure she paid with an attack of fever which never quite left her system. Indeed, that fever had a peculiar effect upon her, which may have been physical or something else. Isobel's fault, or rather characteristic, as the reader may have gathered, was that she built too much upon the material side of things. What she saw, what she knew, what her body told her, what the recorded experience of the world taught--these were real; all the rest, to her, was phantasy or imagination. She kept her feet upon the solid ground of fact, and left all else to dreamers; or, as she would have expressed it, to the victims of superstition inherited or acquired.
Well, something happened to her at the crisis of that fever, which was sharp, and took her on her return from Yucatan, at a horrible port called Frontera, where there were palm trees and /zopilotes/--a kind of vile American vulture--which sat silently on the verandah outside her door in the dreadful little hotel built upon piles in the mud of the great river, and mosquitoes by the ten million, and sleepy-eyed, crushed-looking Indians, and horrible halfbreeds, and everything else which suggests an earthly hell, except the glorious sunshine.
Of a sudden, when she was at her worst, all the materiality--if there be such a word--which circumstances and innate tendency had woven about her as a garment, seemed to melt away, and she became aware of something vast in which she floated like an insect in the atmosphere--@@some surrounding sea which she could neither measure nor travel.
She knew that she was not merely Isobel Blake, but a part of the universe in its largest sense, and that the universe expressed itself in miniature within her soul. She knew that ever since it had been, she was, and that while it existed she would endure. This imagination or inspiration, whichever it may have been, went no further than that, and afterwards she set it down to delirium, or to the exaltation that often accompanies fever. Still, it left a mark upon her, opening a new door in her heart, so to speak.
For the rest, the life in Mexico City was gay, especially in the position which she filled as the niece of the British Minister, who was often called upon to act as hostess, as her aunt was delicate and her cousin was younger than herself and not apt at the business. There were Diaz and the foreign Diplomatic Ministers; also the leading Mexicans to be entertained, for which purpose she learned Spanish.
Then there were English travellers, distinguished, some of them, and German nobles, generally in the Diplomatic Service of their country, whom by some peculiar feminine instinct of her own, she suspected of being spies and generally persons of evil intentions. Also there was the British colony, among whom were some very nice people that she made her friends, the strange, adventurous pioneers of our Empire who are to be bound in every part of the world, and in a sense its cream.