Such was our first day's experience of the formidable guest whose
anticipated visit had so sorely and so absurdly discomposed us
all. I could hardly believe that I had actually wasted hours of
precious time in worrying myself and everybody else in the house
about the best means of laboriously entertaining a lively,
high-spirited girl, who was perfectly capable, without an effort
on her own part or on ours, of entertaining herself.

Having upset every one of our calculations on the first day of
her arrival, she next falsified all our predictions before she
had been with us a week. Instead of fracturing her skull with the
pony, as Morgan had prophesied, she sat the sturdy, sure-footed,
mischievous little brute as if she were part and parcel of
himself. With an old water-proof cloak of mine on her shoulders,
with a broad-flapped Spanish hat of Owen's on her head, with a
wild imp of a Welsh boy following her as guide and groom on a
bare-backed pony, and with one of the largest and ugliest
cur-dogs in England (which she had picked up, lost and starved by
the wayside) barking at her heels, she scoured the country in all
directions, and came back to dinner, as she herself expressed it,
"with the manners of an Amazon, the complexion of a dairy-maid,
and the appetite of a wolf."

On days when incessant rain kept her indoors, she amused herself
with a new freak. Making friends everywhere, as became The Queen
of Hearts, she even ingratiated herself with the sour old
housekeeper, who had predicted so obstinately that she was
certain to run away. To the amazement of everybody in the house,
she spent hours in the kitchen, learning to make puddings and
pies, and trying all sorts of recipes with very varying success,