But the guardship was no place for me, weak and shaken as I then was by my long and serious spell of illness; and although the Admiral might well, in the press of daily affairs, have been excused had he forgotten so unimportant a detail as the state of my health, he did not; on the contrary, he invited me to spend a week at the Pen, to recuperate, during which his wife, Lady Agnes, was a second mother to me and a hospital nurse combined.  From that moment there was no lack of invitations for me to go into the country and regain my strength, my former acquaintances one and all hunting me up and reminding me of several almost forgotten promises that I would visit them.