say for my life.
I suppose they must have been some garden party--I distinctly recall
the gaiters of a bishop and the coloured linings of more than one
doctor's hood among them. They are as sudden, as unexplained in my
memory, as those crowds in dreams, so definite, so individualised,
where haunting, special faces stand out and hands clasp and shoulders
touch--and all fades away. Around the vivid emerald lawn they group
themselves, and Margarita, a pearl in pearly trailing laces, sits on
a stone bench, defaced and mossy, in the centre, at the back; the lads
adore at her feet, the banjo drops tinkling handfuls of chords at
intervals, the birds flutter through the ivy overhead, the watered
turf smells strong and sweet in the fanlike rays of the slow sun;
bright pencils of yellow light fall like stained glass among the
immemorial ivy; the day goes, softly, pensively....

_"Toll the bell for lovely Nell ..."_

"Ah-h-h!" they sigh and melt, and I see nothing more. But the picture
is safe.

Then there was the famous house-party down in Surrey, whither the
elect of England, for some reason or other, seem to gravitate; whether
because the long midsummer Surrey days appear to them the last stage
on the way to a peaceful, well-ordered heaven, in case they expect to
spend eternity there, or a temporary solace, in case they don't! Sue,
to whom all musical Europe opened its doors on poor Frederick's
account, had taken Margarita, to whom the said doors were gladly
opening on her own, to one of the famous country houses of a county
famous for such jewels, and when Roger and I turned up there, who
should our host be but one of my old schoolmates at Vevay--younger son
of a younger son, then, and unimportant to a degree, but advanced
since by one of those series of family holocausts that so change
English county history, to be the head of a great house and lord of
more acres than seems quite discreet--until one is in a position to
slap the lord on the shoulder!

To Sue and me the soft-shod luxury, the studious, ripe comfort of the
great, hedged establishment, were frankly marvellous, accustomed as we
were to the many grades and stages of domestic prosperity between this
rose-lined ease and little-a-year; but Margarita, to whom the old red
jersey of the Island was no more real than the barbaric trappings of
_Aida_, who accepted shells from Caliban or diamonds from
_Mephistopheles_ with equal _sang-froid_, displayed an indifferenc