Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/353

 Marie Corelli to Stratford-on-Avon so greatly as to persuade her to settle there. The cause is a very simple one. From her earliest childhood she had been encouraged by her adopted father, Dr. Charles Mackay, to entertain a great adoration for the name and the works of Shakespeare, and before she was nine years old she used to recite, at his request, whole passages from the plays of the great Master. When she returned from school, he promised to take her for a "pilgrimage," as he termed it, to all the places made notable by Shakespeare's association with them, and to this pilgrimage she had looked forward with the greatest expectation. But it was never to be, for Dr. Mackay's illness came on and prevented all such plans of pleasure from being fulfilled.

When the aged poet died, and his adopted child, broken-hearted at his loss, and feeling herself utterly alone in the world, knew not how to endure the weary days following immediately on his death, she suddenly bethought herself of the "pilgrimage" she and the dear one she had loved so well had arranged to make together. She determined to carry out the plan, and her friend Miss Vyver (who lost her mother in the same year as that of Dr. Mackay's death) accompanied her, as did her stepbrother, Mr. Eric Mackay. With sorrow as well as interest,