ess both with my singing and with the language, and
that Madame Martelli was exceedingly pleased with me. She also said that
I showed no disposition at all to mope, but was as busy and as brisk as a
bee from morning to night. And so I am," said Eleanor with a laugh.
"Madame Martelli sees to that. We have breakfast here every morning at
eight, and by a quarter to nine I am down at Milan Cottage, which is the
name of Madame's house, and I study and sing with her until half-past
twelve, when I come home. We lunch at one, have tea at four, and directly
after tea I go down to Milan Cottage again and am taken for a little walk
by Madame. At half-past seven Mrs. Murray and I dine, and at half-past
nine we go to bed. And that has been my daily life for the last three
weeks."

But there was no need to ask Eleanor if she was satisfied with it. Every
line of her face expressed radiant happiness, and though she spoke
jestingly of the way in which her nose was kept to the grindstone,
Margaret knew that she was really revelling in this chance of getting the
instruction in Italian that she wanted. And as for the singing lessons,
their value, she declared vehemently, was beyond price to her. Any time
during the last two years she would, she said, have gladly lived in a
hovel, fared on bread and water, and gone barefoot and in rags for the
sake of them.

"Sometimes I wake up in the night and think I am only dreaming a
beautiful dream," she said, "and that when I really am awake I shall find
myself back in Hampstead in the ugly little dingy room that I shared with
two little girls. And then I have to light my candle and look round me
and assure myself that I really am in the pretty white bedroom that Mrs.
Murray has given to me here, and that my good fortune is a reality and
not a dream."

"Has your life been a very unhappy one?" Margaret asked her gravely one
day.

"I have often been very unhappy," Eleanor answered thoughtfully; "but
that, of course, is different to having had an unhappy life. Of course,
my mother's and my father's death was a great grief to me, and when the
sense of the awful loss their death was to me grew less the resentment I
felt at my changed circumstances made me awfully bitter and unhappy for a
time. For I can tell you it was a violent change. Up to the age of
thirteen I lived as if I were going to be rich all my life and was the
spoilt darling of my parents and of every one round me. After that I was
a pup