The house which Lady Maulevrier had built for herself and her
grandchildren had not been created all at once, though the nucleus
dating forty years back was a handsome building. She had added more
rooms as necessity or fancy dictated, now a library with bedrooms over
it, now a music room for Lady Lesbia and her grand piano--anon a
billiard-room, as an agreeable surprise for Maulevrier when he came home
after a tour in America. Thus the house had grown into a long low pile
of Tudor masonry--steep gables, heavily mullioned casements, grey stone
walls, curtained with the rich growth of passion-flower, magnolia,
clematis, myrtle and roses--and all those flowers which thrive and
flourish in that mild and sheltered spot.
The views from those mullioned casements were perfect. Switzerland could
give hardly any more exquisite picture than that lake shut in by hills,
grand and bold in their varied outlines, so rich in their colouring that
the eye, dazzled with beauty, forgot to calculate the actual height of
those craggy peaks and headlands, the mind forgot to despise them
because they were not so lofty as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn.
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