ur fowl
cackling? It is,--at half-past six! She heard me mention omelet and she
must be calling, 'Now I lay me down to sleep.'"

. . . .

But all that is many days ago, and there are no more experiences to
relate at present. We are making history very fast, Willie Beresford and
I, but much of it is sacred history, and so I cannot chronicle it for
any one's amusement.

Mrs. Beresford is here, or at least she is in Great Belvern, a few miles
distant. I am not painting, these latter days. I have turned the artist
side of my nature to the wall just for a bit, and the woman side is
having full play. I do not know what the world will think about it, if
it stops to think at all, but I feel as if I were 'right side out' for
the first time in my life; and when I take up my brushes again, I shall
have a new world within from which to paint,--yes, and a new world
without.

Good-bye, dear Belvern! Autumn and winter may come into my life, but
whenever I think of you it will be summer-time in my heart. I shall hear
the tinkle of the belled sheep on the hillsides; inhale the fragrance
of the flowering vine that climbed in at my cottage window; relive in
memory the days when Love and I first walked together, hand in hand.
Dear days of happy idleness; of dreaming dreams and seeing visions; of
morning walks over the hills; of 'bread-and-cheese and kisses' at noon,
with kind Mrs. Bobby hovering like a plump guardian angel over the
simple feast; afternoon tea under the friendly shades of the yew-tree,
and parting at the wicket-gate. I can see him pass the clock-tower, the
little greengrocer shop, the old stocks, the green pump; then he is at
the turn of the road where the stone wall and the hawthorn hedge will
presently hide him from my view. I fly up to my window, push back the
vines, catch his last wave of the hand. I would call him back, if I
dared; but it would be no easier to let him go the second time, and
there is always to-morrow. Thank God for to-morrow! And if there should
be no to-morrow? Then thank God for to-day! And so good-bye again, dear
Belvern! It was in the lap of your lovely hills that Penelope first knew
das irdische Gluck; that she first loved, first lived; forgot how to be
artist, in remembering how to be woman.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Penelope's English Experiences, by
Kate Douglas Wiggin

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PENELOPE'S ENGLISH EXPE