ide at our
envy and approbation! I did a water-colour sketch of her and sent it to
Ronald, receiving in return a letter bubbling over with fond admiration
and gratitude. She seems always in tone with the season and the
landscape, does Francesca, and she arrives at it unconsciously, too.
She glances out of her window at the yellow laburnum-tree when she
is putting on her white frock, and it suggests to her all her amber
trinkets and her drooping hat with the wreath of buttercups. When she
came to my hawthorn luncheon at Rosaleen Cottage she did not make the
mistake of heaping pink on pink, but wore a cotton gown of palest green,
with a bunch of rosy blossoms at her belt. I painted her just as she
stood under the hawthorn, with its fluttering petals and singing birds,
calling the picture Grainne Mael [*]: A Vision of Erinn, writing under
it the verse:--

'The thrushes seen in bushes green are singing loud--
Bid sadness go and gladness glow,--give welcome proud!
The Rover comes, the Lover, whom you long bewail,
O'er sunny seas, with honey breeze, to Grainne Mael.'

* Pronounced Graunia Wael, the M being modified. It is one
of the endearing names given to Ireland in the Penal Times.

Benella, I fancy, never had so varied a week in her life, and she was
in her element. We were obliged to hire a side-car by the day, as two
of our residences were over a mile apart; and the driver of that vehicle
was the only person, I think, who had any suspicion of our sanity. In
the intervals of teaching Francesca cooking, and eating the results
while the cook herself prudently lunched or dined with her friends,
Benella 'spring-cleaned' the lodge at the Old Hall, scrubbed the
gateposts, mended stone walls, weeded garden beds, made bags for the
brooms and dusters and mattresses, burned coffee and camphor and other
ill-smelling things in all the rooms, and devoted considerable time to
superintending my little maid, that I might not feel neglected. We were
naturally obliged, meanwhile, to wait upon ourselves and keep our frocks
in order; but as long as the Derelict was so busy and happy, and
so devoted to the universal good, it would have been churlish and
ungrateful to complain.

On leaving the Wee Hut, as Francesca had, with ostentatious modesty,
named her residence, she paid her landlady two pounds, and was
discomfited when the exuberant and impetuous woman embraced her in a
paroxysm of weeping gratit