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 CHAPTER XLI

LADY HAMILTON

The daisies we string in chains before ten, we tread under foot without compunction after twenty. Cerise, pacing a noble terrace rolled and levelled beneath the windows of her husband's home, gave no thought to the humble petals bending to her light footfall, and rising again when it passed on; gave no thought to the flaring hollyhocks, the crimson roses, all the bright array of autumn's gaudier flowers flaunting about her in the imposing splendour of maturity; gave no thought even to the fair expanse of moor and meadow, dale and dingle, copse and corn-field, wood, wold, and water, on which her eyes were bent.

She might have travelled many a mile, too, even through beautiful England, without beholding such a scene. Over-*head, the sky, clear and pure in the late summer, or the early autumn, seemed but of a deeper blue, because flecked here and there with wind-swept streaks of misty white. Around her glowed, in Nature's gaudiest patch-work, all the garden beauty that had survived July. On a lower level by a few inches lay a smooth, trim bowling-green, dotted with its unfinished game; and downward still, foot by foot, like a wide green staircase, row after row of terraces were banked, and squared, and spread between their close-cut black yew hedges, till they descended to the ivy-grown wall that divided pleasure-ground from park. Here, slopes of tufted grass, swelling into bolder outlines as they receded, rolled, like the volume of a freshening sea, into knolls, and dips, and ridges, feathered in waving fern—dotted with goodly oaks—traversed by deep, narrow