pines beside it, the clouds above it. Not many palaces would be reckoned
as larger. The folds and swells and stream of the building along the
roll of ground, had an appearance of an enormous banner on the wind.
Nataly looked. Her next look was at Colney Durance. She sent the
expected nods to Victor's carriage. She would have given the whole
prospect for the covering solitariness of her chamber. A multitude of
clashing sensations, and a throat-thickening hateful to her, compelled
her to summon so as to force herself to feel a groundless anger,
directed against none, against nothing, perfectly crazy, but her only
resource for keeping down the great wave surgent at her eyes.

Victor was like a swimmer in morning sea amid the exclamations
encircling him. He led through the straight passage of the galleried
hall, offering two fair landscapes at front door and at back, down to
the lake, Fredi's lake; a good oblong of water, notable in a district
not abounding in the commodity. He would have it a feature of the
district; and it had been deepened and extended; up rose the springs,
many ran the ducts. Fredi's pretty little bathshed or bower had a space
of marble on the three-feet shallow it overhung with a shade of carved
woodwork; it had a diving-board for an eight-feet plunge; a punt and
small row-boat of elegant build hard by. Green ran the banks about, and
a beechwood fringed with birches curtained the Northward length: morning
sun and evening had a fair face of water to paint. Saw man ever the like
for pleasing a poetical damsel? So was Miss Fredi, the coldest of the
party hitherto, and dreaming a preference of 'old places' like Creckholt
and Craye Farm, 'captured to be enraptured,' quite according to man's
ideal of his beneficence to the sex. She pressed the hand of her young
French governess, Louise de Seilles. As in everything he did for his
girl, Victor pointed boastfully to his forethought of her convenience
and her tastes: the pine-panels of the interior, the shelves for her
books, pegs to hang her favourite drawings, and the couch-bunk under a
window to conceal the summerly recliner while throwing full light on
her book; and the hearth-square for logs, when she wanted fire: because
Fredi bathed in any weather: the oaken towel-coffer; the wood-carvings
of doves, tits, fishes; the rod for the flowered silken hangings she was
to choose, and have shy odalisque peeps of sunny water from her couch.

'Fredi's Naiad retrea