After a few years of really perfect domestic bliss Elizabeth and her "Harry" had a rather serious quarrel, which ended in Lord Valmond's going off to shoot big game in the wilds of Africa, leaving Elizabeth, who (in the absence of her mother and her favourite cousin, Octavia, abroad) had taken refuge with her great aunt Maria at Heaviland Manor, in an obstinate and disconsolate frame of mind. Lord Valmond was two days out on his voyage when Elizabeth wrote to her parent: