e wide lawn immediately behind the Villa
du Lac, and were walking by a long, high wall. The Count pushed open a
narrow door set in an arch in the wall, and Sylvia walked through into
one of the largest and most delightful kitchen-gardens she had ever seen.

It was brilliant with colour and scent; the more homely summer flowers
filled the borders, while, at each place where four paths met, a round,
stone-rimmed basin, filled with water to the brim, gave a sense of
pleasant coolness.

The farther end of the walled garden was bounded by a stone orangery, a
building dating from the eighteenth century, and full of the stately
grace of a vanished epoch.

"What a delightful place!" Sylvia exclaimed. "But this garden must cost
M. Polperro a great deal of money to keep up--"

The Comte de Virieu laughed.

"Far from it! Our clever host hires out his _potager_ to a firm of market
gardeners, part of the bargain being that they allow him to have as much
fruit and vegetables as he requires throughout the year. Why, the
_potager_ of the Villa du Lac supplies the whole of Lacville with fruit
and flowers! When I was a child I thought this part of the garden
paradise, and I spent here my happiest hours."

"It must be very odd for you to come back and stay in the Villa now that
it is an hotel."

"At first it seemed very strange," he answered gravely. "But now I have
become quite used to the feeling."

They walked on for awhile along one of the narrow flower-bordered paths.

"Would you care to go into the orangery?" he said. "There is not much to
see there now, for all the orange-trees are out of doors. Still, it is a
quaint, pretty old building."

The orangery of the Villa du Lac was an example of that at once
artificial and graceful eighteenth-century architecture which, perhaps
because of its mingled formality and delicacy, made so distinguished
and attractive a setting to feminine beauty. It remained, the only
survival of the dependencies of a chateau sacked and burned in the Great
Revolution, more than half a century before the Villa du Lac was built.

The high doors were wide open, and Sylvia walked in. Though all the
pot-plants and half-hardy shrubs were sunning themselves in the open-air,
the orangery did not look bare, for every inch of the inside walls had
been utilised for growing grapes and peaches.

There was a fountain set in the centre of the stone floor, and near the
fountain was a circular seat.

"Let us si