It was my good fortune, many years ago, to make friends with a woman whose name was as beautiful as her mind—Mary Grace. We met in another hemisphere, under the Southern Cross, and for many days lived together in Chile’s one little Paradise, Viña del Mar. There, in shady patios, trellised with jessamine and bougainvillea, we talked of the impossible—of meeting in Rome and going together to the holy places and making better acquaintance with the Saints. Two or three years later the impossible happened. My Mary, with her daughter, Lilium, floated into my mother’s drawing-room in the Odescalchi one April afternoon, when the swallows were whirling above the courtyard and the house seemed all roses and sunshine. In the weeks that followed all our dream programme was realized; together we went to the Pope’s Mass, together knelt at his feet while Leo XIII laid his hand on Lilium’s golden head and blessed us and promised to pray for us and all our dear ones; and together we wandered from place to place in the Eternal City, I, who had known it all my life, learning many things from her who came there for the first time, as so often happens. Of all those pleasant inspiring hours, the one we both remembered most appreciatively, I think, was that of our visit to a lonely spot on the Aventine—the hill that somehow has always kept its character and is even to-day very little hurt by the destructions that have defaced most of the other quarters of the town. My friend was Irish, _pur sang_, and her appreciations were extremely individual ones: things that other people felt obliged to rave about left her quite cold; but when she had caught and joined the links of some beautiful story that the world had overlooked or forgotten, she became a veritable flame of enthusiasm, and every tiny detail and souvenir she could connect with it had to be sought out and stored in the big warm shrine of her heart. I think, though I am not certain, that she knew the story of the house on the Aventine before she came to Rome. Any way, it was she who took me there, and we went over story and house together, and were exceeding loath to come away when the Ave Maria rang over the city and all respectable people turned their faces homewards.