The Custom House officials, the boatmen, raised scores of difficulties. Shelley brushed them aside by the sheer force of a will-power that takes no notice of the outside world, and in a few days the two families were settled in at the seaside. * * * Casa Magni has been a Jesuit convent. It was a white house standing almost in the sea, and backing against a forest. A terrace, supported on arches, overhung the superb Bay of Spezzia. The ground floor was unpaved and uninhabitable, being reached by the waves when the sea was rough. It was used simply for storing boat-gear and fishing tackle. The single storey over this was divided into a large hall or saloon, and four small bedrooms which opened from it: two for Shelley and Mary, one for the Williamses and one for Claire. The accommodation was scanty, and the first evening depressing. Down below the waves beat against the rocks with a mournful persistency. The Williamses and Shelleys could think of nothing but Claire, and she, with no idea of the dreadful truth, imagined they were annoyed at having her there with them in a house which was obviously too small. She said so, and offered to go back to Florence. Every one cried out against this. Jane whispered something to Mary, and the two withdrew to the Williamses’ room. Shelley joined them. Claire went towards the room after a moment or two: she found them in eager conversation which instantly ceased as they saw her. Then before a single word had been uttered, she said: “Allegra is dead?” The next day she wrote Byron a terrible letter, which he returned to Shelley complaining of Claire’s harshness towards him, and begging Shelley to let her know he would allow her to make any arrangements she liked for the burial of their child. She replied with a sombre irony that for the future she left everything to him, and that all she asked was a portrait of Allegra and a piece of her hair. Byron became surprisingly pliable, sent almost at once a very pretty miniature and a dark curl. Claire took leave of her friends at Casa Magni, and went back to Florence to live amongst strangers, who, knowing nothing of her grief, could do nothing to revive it. Byron decided to have his daughter buried in England, in the church of Harrow-on-the-Hill, where he had been at school, and to place on the wall above the grave a marble tablet with the words: TO THE MEMORY OF ALLEGRA DAUGHTER OF GEORGE GORDON LORD BYRON DIED AT BAGNA-CAVALLO, THE 20TH APRIL, 1822. AGED FIVE YEARS AND SIX MONTHS. I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me. II Sam. xii. 23.