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Title: A House-Party
Don Gesualdo and A Rainy June

Author: Ouida

Release Date: May 1, 2010 [eBook #32199]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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Transcriber's note:

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A HOUSE-PARTY

Don Gesualdo

and

A Rainy June

by

OUIDA

Author Of "Othmar," "Princess Napeaxine," "Under Two Flags," "Wanda,"
Etc., Etc.

Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott Company.
1902.

A HOUSE-PARTY.

CHAPTER I.

It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a
breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts;
it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with
stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old
French, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron
resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely
garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the
gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors
and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of
Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are
beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the
Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge
old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the
woods and grassy lawns of the home park.

The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George,
Earl of Usk,--his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn,
and what