form of
handiwork, suspiciously tiny in shape, but she pursued it relentlessly
while we discussed the changes in the cottage; the gardens, the corn
and asparagus planned for another season; the ducks quartered near the
fresh-water brook; the tiny dairy built for her over the spring; the
brick-wall for Roger's pet wall fruit; the piano dragged by oxen from
the village; the sail-boat, manned now and then by our enthusiastic
telegrapher: the wondrous size and health of the tiny Mary.

She was called, as one who knew Roger might have expected, for his
mother, after the old tradition, too, that gave every eldest daughter
of the Bradleys that lovely name. No bitter obstinacy, no unyielding
pride of Madam Bradley's could alter in his calm mind the course of
his duty, and I never heard a harsh word from him concerning the
matter. Margarita cared absolutely nothing about it and never, he told
me, expressed the faintest curiosity as to his family or their
relations with her.

Soon she was with us, dear and beautiful, with only a tiny lavender
shadow under those cloudy eyes--misty just now and a little empty,
with that placid emptiness of the nursing mother--to mark the change
that my not-to-be-deceived scrutiny soon discovered. We left the
sleepy Mary slowly patrolling the brick walks in a pompous
perambulator propelled by a motherly English nurse under Miss Jencks's
watchful eye, and strolled, in our customary hand-in-hand, to the
boat-house, a low, artfully concealed structure, all but hidden under
a jagged cliff, and faced wherever necessary with rough cobbled
sea-stones sunk in wet cement and hardened there. The right wing of
the cottage stood out unavoidably at one point against the skyline,
and Roger, who had developed a surprising gift of architecture and a
sort of rough landscape gardening, was planning an extension of the
artificial sea-wall to cover this.

He worked at this himself, drenched with sweat, tugging at the stones,
while Caliban and a mason from the village set them and threw sand
over the wet plaster (the method which we decided must have been
adopted by the builder of the cottage), and I, too weak yet to help in
this giant's play, criticised the effect from a rowboat outside the
lagoon, telegraphing messages by means of a handkerchief code. Often
Margarita would come with me, embroidering placidly in the bow of the
boat, under her wide hat. She detested sewing, and refused utterly to
learn any form of