And so north, almost paralleling their first trip, they ran through Mende, Bourges, and Montargis, and one rainy afternoon passed within sight of the village of Grez, where so many years before Fanny Osbourne first met Louis Stevenson, but the memories that it brought were too poignant, and she was only able to give one look as they sped swiftly by.
Arriving in Paris on October 3, after this leisurely journey through beautiful France, they remained but a few days there and then went on to London, where they met the Favershams and sailed in company with them for America on the _Vaterland_. With but a brief stop in New York they hastened on to San Francisco to carry out a certain plan that had been formulated while they were in France. Oddly enough, it was on the other side of the world that Mrs. Stevenson first heard of beautiful Stonehedge, the place at Santa Barbara which became the home of her last days. At Monte Carlo she met Mrs. Clarence Postley, of California, who dilated on the charms of the Santa Barbara place--its fine old trees, its spring water, its romantic story of being haunted by the ghost of a beautiful countess--until finally Mrs. Stevenson said that if it was as charming as that she would buy it. After her return to California she went to see it, and, finding it even more lovely than she had been told, the bargain was struck. It had been evident for some time, too, that her health required a warmer climate than that of San Francisco, and, above all, she longed for a place where she might live more in the open than the winds and fogs of the bay city permitted. So, though she was very sad at leaving the house on the heights where she had lived long enough for her heart-strings to take root, she sold it in 1908 and removed to the southern place, there to enter on a new phase of her life.
The house at Hyde and Lombard Streets, following out the curious fatality that made everything connected with her take on some romantic aspect, became for a time the abode of Carmelite Sisters, the Roman Catholic Order whose strict rules require its devotees to live almost completely cut off from the world. The long drawing-room, where Mrs. Stevenson had entertained so many of the great people of the earth, became the chapel, and in place of the light laughter and gay talk that once echoed from its walls only the low intoning of the mass was heard. At the front door, where the Indian pagan idols had kept guard, a revolving cylinder was placed so that the charitable might put in their donations without seeing the faces or hearing the voices of the immured nuns. In the green garden where Mrs. Stevenson had so often walked and dreamed of other days the gentle sisters knelt and prayed that the sins of the world might be forgiven.