with which it closed, she found a fine solace
in this fair land and this soft sky, which the sad perhaps can alone
experience. Its repose alone afforded a consolatory contrast to the
turbulent pleasure of the great world. She looked back upon those
glittering and noisy scenes with an aversion which was only modified
by her self-congratulation at her escape from their exhausting and
contaminating sphere. Here she recurred, but with all the advantages
of a change of scene, and a scene so rich in novel and interesting
associations, to the calm tenor of those days, when not a thought ever
seemed to escape from Cherbury and its spell-bound seclusion. Her
books, her drawings, her easel, and her harp, were now again her chief
pursuits; pursuits, however, influenced by the genius of the land in
which she lived, and therefore invested with a novel interest; for
the literature and the history of the country naturally attracted her
attention; and its fair aspects and sweet sounds, alike inspired her
pencil and her voice. She had, in the society of her mother, indeed,
the advantage of communing with a mind not less refined and cultivated
than her own. Lady Annabel was a companion whose conversation, from
reading and reflection, was eminently suggestive; and their hours,
though they lived in solitude, never hung heavy. They were always
employed, and always cheerful. But Venetia was not more than cheerful.
Still very young, and gifted with an imaginative and therefore
sanguine mind, the course of circumstances, however, had checked her
native spirit, and shaded a brow which, at her time of life and with
her temperament, should have been rather fanciful than pensive. If
Venetia, supported by the disciplined energies of a strong mind, had
schooled herself into not looking back to the past with grief, her
future was certainly not tinged with the Iris pencil of Hope. It
seemed to her that it was her fate that life should bring her no
happier hours than those she now enjoyed. They did not amount to
exquisite bliss. That was a conviction which, by no process of
reflection, however ingenious, could she delude herself to credit.
Venetia struggled to take refuge in content, a mood of mind perhaps
less natural than it should be to one so young, so gifted, and so
fair!

Their villa was surrounded by a garden in the ornate and artificial
style of the country. A marble terrace overlooked the lake, crowned
with many a statue and vase that held th