ruefully and reluctantly accompanied her. Byron received him with genuine delight, and, in an access of good humour, proposed lending the party his villa at Este. There Mrs. Shelley, who had lost her infant daughter, might recover from sorrow and fatigue, and there Allegra might spend some weeks under her mother's care. The offer was frankly accepted, and the two men came once more to an amicable understanding. They were not fitted to be friends,—the gods had ruled a severance wide and deep;—but when unpricked by the contentiousness of other people, they passed pleasant and profitable hours together.
Meanwhile, the poor little apple of discord was ripening every day into a fairer bloom. "Allegra has been with me these three months," writes Byron to his sister in August. "She is very pretty, remarkably intelligent, and a great favourite with everybody. … She has very blue eyes, a singular forehead, fair curly hair, and a devil of a Spirit,—but that is Papa's." "I have here my natural daughter, by name Allegra," he tells Moore six weeks later. "She is a pretty little girl enough, and reckoned like
