Around 1900 she was helping the poor in London, when she contracted a lung disease, and her younger sister died. In 1901 she travelled to Devon to convalesce and spent time with her mother in the Dartmoor village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor. By 1908 she and her mother had bought a farm at Venton about south-south-east of the village. She later wrote about the discovery of the property in a book "A Book of Answered Prayers" that she published as Olive Katherine Parr in 1915. They rented out the farm and its outbuildings, but retained a cottage in which they lived, and built an adjacent Roman Catholic chapel which was licensed as a public oratory by Dr. Charles Graham, the Bishop of Plymouth, and for which the sacrament was reserved in 1910 until it was universally withdrawn by the Vatican in 1920.