years younger.  She was a very dear, delightful girl, that aunt of yours, of whom I suppose you know nothing more than the name.  She did not shine so much by personal beauty and a cultivated mind, in which your mother was far superior.  It was her good sense, the admirable sweetness of her nature, her exceptional facility and ease in daily relations that endeared her to everybody.  Her death was a terrible grief and a serious moral loss for us all.  Had she lived she would have brought the greatest blessings to the house it would have been her lot to enter, as wife, mother and mistress of a household.  She would have created round herself an atmosphere of peace and content which only those who can love unselfishly are able to evoke.  Your mother—­of far greater beauty, exceptionally distinguished in person, manner and intellect—­had a less easy disposition.  Being more brilliantly gifted she also expected more from life.  At that trying time especially, we were greatly concerned about her state.  Suffering in her health from the shock of her father’s death (she was alone in the house with him when he died suddenly), she was torn by the inward struggle between her love for the man whom she was to marry in the end and her knowledge of her dead father’s declared objection to that match.  Unable to bring herself to disregard that cherished memory and that judgment she had always respected and trusted, and, on the other hand, feeling the impossibility to resist a sentiment so deep and so true, she could not have been expected to preserve her mental and moral balance.  At war with herself, she could not give to others that feeling of peace which was not her own.  It was only later, when united at last with the man of her choice that she developed those uncommon gifts of mind and heart which compelled the respect and admiration even of our foes.  Meeting with calm fortitude the cruel trials of a life reflecting all the national and social misfortunes of the community, she realised the highest conceptions of duty as a wife, a mother and a patriot, sharing the exile of her husband and representing nobly the ideal of Polish womanhood.  Our Uncle Nicholas was not a man very accessible to feelings of affection.  Apart from his worship for Napoleon the Great, he loved really, I believe, only three people in the world:  his mother—­your great-grandmother, whom you have seen but cannot possibly remember; his brother, our father, in whose house he lived for so many years; and of all of us, his nephews and nieces grown up round him, your mother alone.  The modest, lovable qualities of the youngest sister he did not seem able to see.  It was I who felt most profoundly this unexpected stroke of death falling upon the family less than a year after I had become its head.  It was terribly unexpected.  Driving home one wintry afternoon to keep me company in our empty house, where I had to remain permanently administering the estate and attending to the complicated affairs—­(the