Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/105

 could only express his happiness and honour, and his regrets that Palestrina was little more than an empty shell for their inspection.

The day after the morrow was clear and cloudless, balmy and delicious; such days as the Floralian climate casts here and there generously amidst the winter cold as a foretaste of its paradise of summer. The snow was on the more distant mountains of course, but only made the landscape more lovely, changing to the softest blush colour and rose under the brightness of the noonday sun. The fields were green with the springing cereals; the pine-woods were filling with violets; the water-courses were brimming and boisterously joyous.

It was winter still; but the sort of winter that one would expect in Fairyland or in the planet Venus.

Madame Mila, clad in the strictest directoire costume, with a wonderful hat on her head that carried feathers, grasses, oleander flowers, and a bird of Dutch Guiana, and was twisted up on one side in a miraculous manner, descended with her Maurice to the Lady Hilda's victoria, lent