ent tonic.

And Eleanor, now that she knew that Margaret had no intention of ousting
her from her quarters at Rose Cottage, always welcomed her warmly, and
many were the long conversations that the two girls enjoyed in the little
arbour in the corner of the kitchen garden that had witnessed their first
momentous interview.

Margaret could reach Windy Gap now in a little under an hour, for she had
found out many short cuts across the grass, by means of which she avoided
the long, twisting high-road that ran by the edge of the cliffs
altogether. And by leaving the steep lane that led from the little
village in the hollow up to Rose Cottage before it brought her to the
front gate she could skirt below the wall that enclosed the domain and
enter the kitchen garden by a side gate without coming in sight of the
windows at all. It was Eleanor who had shown her this mode of entry and
who had also told her that the early hours of the afternoon between two
and four were the ones on which Margaret could most surely count on
finding her alone, for Mrs. Murray always took a nap after lunch and was
not visible again until tea-time. If Margaret found her days at The
Cedars empty and somewhat long, Eleanor up at Rose Cottage had nothing at
all to complain of in that respect.

"My dear Margaret," she said one day, "you must have led a strenuous life
from your youth up if, even when you are supposed to be taking things
easy, you have had such a course of study, as I am compelled to pursue in
your place, mapped out for you. If your grandfather had wished you to
become a naturalised Italian he couldn't have been keener on your
acquiring a thorough knowledge of the language. He never writes to me,
but I know he wrote a long letter to Mrs. Murray the other day hoping
that I was getting on with my studies and that neither she nor Madame
Martelli permitted me to mope and dream my time away in the profitless,
silly way that had of late become habitual to me, and which was admirably
adapted, if the habit were encouraged, to weaken my brain permanently."

Margaret coloured faintly as Eleanor quoted that passage from Mr.
Anstruther's letter. For a moment she almost imagined that she could hear
her grandfather's caustic voice speaking to her, and though what he had
said was not particularly flattering, she knew that it contained a
certain amount of truth.

"Mrs. Murray wrote back and told him," Eleanor went on, "that I was
making capital progr