"We arrived in London after a bitter journey," the letter ran, "the frost has returned, and the cold is dreadful. I am afraid Maryska feels it very much after Ragusa, and is not grateful to us for bringing her to such an inhospitable country. The streets of London shone like rivers of ice as we drove through, and even my father now admits that there is something in a taxi. What Maryska does not understand is your threatened journey to America, and your unkindness in leaving us all with so brief a farewell. She is very strange here, and she is entirely without friends--though Harry has done his best to cheer her up, and has really developed surprising powers as a private entertainer. Perhaps the cold and the fog have affected her spirits unduly--I would not make too much of it, but she is undoubtedly changed since we left Venice, and the change is not for the better! This much you ought to know. "Of course, it is much too early yet to speak of the house. We are all at Hampstead in the old home, and it seems difficult to believe that so much has happened in so short a time. I refuse to allow that Christmas Day falls next week, and that in twelve days we shall be ringing the old year out. If anything could convince me it is this bitter cold, this biting cruel weather, which is like nothing England has seen before, and I hope will be like nothing that is to come after. Here at Hampstead, they say the ice is inches thick upon the ponds--I can hear the whir of the skates from my windows, and everyone who passes is dressed like a grizzly bear. Maryska has seen a severe winter in America, and suffered terribly there because of the cold. So you will understand how anxious we are about her, and how very watchful it is necessary to be. "My father says she is the strangest compound of oddities he has ever encountered. It is a description which does less than justice to an original character. Of religion she has none. Her god is an oath--nothing more: and yet to say that she is without a deep capacity of feeling would be untrue. Some of her ideas are fantastic--I suppose the orthodox would call them barbarous. She has a locket about her throat with a miniature of the Crucifixion after Francesco. I know that she has painted out the face of Christ, and made a crude likeness of her father in its place. Her trunk is full of his drawings--there are hardly any clothes, poor child, and we shall have to fit her out directly she is well enough. By that time we should know where we are to live, if I can persuade my father to see the house agents. He has a morbid idea that he will commit some great mistake, and I should not be surprised if he took a good many houses before the New Year.