"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 progress 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."