ltered spot.

The views from those mullioned casements were perfect. Switzerland could
give hardly any more exquisite picture than that lake shut in by hills,
grand and bold in their varied outlines, so rich in their colouring that
the eye, dazzled with beauty, forgot to calculate the actual height of
those craggy peaks and headlands, the mind forgot to despise them
because they were not so lofty as Mont Blanc or the Matterhorn. The
velvet sward of the hill sloped steeply downward from Lady Maulevrier's
drawing-room windows to the road beside the lake, and this road was so
hidden by the wooded screen which bounded her ladyship's grounds that
the lake seemed to lie in the green heart of her gardens, a lovely,
placid lake on summer days, reflecting the emerald hue of the
surrounding hills, and looking like a smooth green meadow, which invited
the foot passenger to cross it.

The house was approached by a winding carriage drive that led up and up
and up from the road beside the lake, so screened and sheltered by
shrubberies and pine woods, that the stranger knew not whither he was
going, till he came upon an opening in the wood, and the stately Italian
garden in front of a massive stone porch, through which he entered a
spacious oak-panelled hall, and anon, descending a step or two, he found
himself in Lady Maulevrier's drawing-room, and face to face with that
divine view of the everlasting hills, the lake shining below him,
bathed in sunlight.

Or if it were the stranger's evil fate to come in wet weather, he saw
only a rain-blotted landscape--the blurred outlines of grey mountain
peaks, scowling at him from the other side of a grey pool. But if the
picture without were depressing, the picture within was always good to
look upon, for those oak-panelled or tapestried rooms, communicating by
richly-curtained doorways from drawing room to library, from library to
billiard room, were as perfect as wealth and taste could make them. Lady
Maulevrier argued that as there was but one house among all the
possessions of her race which she cared to inhabit, she had a right to
make that house beautiful, and she had spared nothing upon the
beautification of Fellside; and yet she had spent much less than would
have been squandered by any pleasure-loving dowager, restlessly roving
from Piccadilly to the Engadine, from Pontresina to Nice or Monaco,
winding up with Easter in Paris, and then back to Piccadilly. Her
ladyship's friends won