Page:Othmar, by Ouida.djvu/11

 OTHMAR.

rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same oak-boughs. 'Why should we not hold one also ? If we have advanced in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hairsplitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. They laughed, or they sighed, and were sincere in both ; but we do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.' So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o'clock dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of late summer in The hush of old warm woods that lie Low in the lap of evening, hright And bathed in vast tranquillity.