ing it completely from the shore, and hardly
a year passed after that without thickening and lengthening that
concealing wall. Oh, we guarded our jewel, I can tell you!

It was that summer, I think, that Whistler came to us and drew that
series of sepia sketches that frames the big fireplace. They are on
the plaster itself--a sort of exquisite fresco--and Venice sails,
Holland wind-mills and London docks cluster round the faded bricks
with an indescribably fascinating effect. At my urgent request I was
allowed to protect them with thin tiles of glass riveted through the
corners into the plaster: how the collectors' mouths water at the
sight of them!

Stevenson came a few years later: all the quaint comforts and intimate
beauties hidden away behind the boulders plainly caught his elfish,
childlike fancy--it was he who made the little grotto beyond the
asparagus bed, lined the pool in it with unusual shells and coloured
pebbles, fitted odd bits of looking-glass here and there, and wrote a
poem on a smooth stone at the door for little Mary, to whom he
dedicated it.

"The purple pool of mussel shells,
All full of salty ocean smells,
The coral branches in the wall--
And you the mermaid queen of all ..."

She used to recite it all very charmingly. Roger never wanted it
printed in the _Child's Garden of Verses_, where it properly
belongs--one of the best of them, in my opinion.

He and Margarita talked together by the hour and I have seen his
dog-like brown eyes fixed on her an hour at a time. I asked him once
if he intended to "put her in a story"--the quaint query of the
layman, so strangely irritating to the book-man--and he shook his
loose-locked head slowly.

"They say I can't do women, you know," he said, "and nobody would
believe her if I put her in, she's too artistically effective."

And here am I doing it! Fools rush in ...

It may seem odd that Roger and I should not discuss the opera
business, but we didn't. That it hurt him I knew, for I knew Roger.
Anglo-Saxon to the backbone, the position which his wife as a
successful operatic star must put him in could be nothing but highly
distasteful to him. It is one thing to snatch your wife from the
stage, as Margarita's noble grandfather had done, and enjoy her in
your home; it is quite another to see her snatched from your home to
that stage, after you have married her. But I have never known a
juster man, and though he talked little of the "