It was not until December, when Lady Campstown was fairly established at Villa Julia, on the slope of the Californie, under house-walls obscured by bougainvillea and arbutilon and Gloire de Dijon roses, that she felt in the least assuaged of her disappointment. She had left London swathed in a yellow fog of appalling density, had run down to Dover in an atmosphere of pea-soup; had found Paris under weeping skies; had traversed France in a murky mist; and only on waking up in Cannes next morning had renewed acquaintance with the sun.
As she looked out of her window, the olives and palms seemed to wave a welcome to the south. The sea laughed in every ripple of its wide expanse, the mountains slept under their veil of azure, the light over all was almost intolerably bright. The flowers that she so well loved, blooming overhead and underfoot, springing from wall crannies, gladdening and glorying every available spot of earth, made her ladyship feel once more like her own even-tempered, happy self!
She had not heard from the wanderers in the Balkans, but had felt resigned that dear Clan had not pushed on to that dreadful far-away Tibet, where men were flayed alive if they happened not to please the rulers upon whose land they were trespassing, which would have been so much worse! She and her maid, and a servant or two brought out from England, occupied themselves for a day in unpacking and readjusting ornaments, putting flowers and plants about the rooms, and looking over the garden, a lovely tiny place where roses ran riot, and palm trees waved their feathered tops or clashed together their spiked leaves with a little metallic ring, when the breeze stirred them from their majestic calm.
There were many finer, many larger, many more cared-for gardens in the town, though none that gave more satisfaction to its owner. Lady Campstown knew and loved every inch of it, but the spot most often resorted to by her, in hot sunshine, was a tunnel cut in a thicket of bamboos terminating her domain, from which a gate led out under the wall of the adjoining lordly pleasure house called "Villa Reine des Fées." Above this wall arose the symmetrical shafts of a cypress avenue, into which, and far beyond it, Lady Campstown had been accustomed to penetrate at will, through a little green door hidden by verdure, placed there for the convenience of the gardeners. The lodge-keeper of this deserted dwelling, to whose child her ladyship had ministered in illness, and all the other employees of the place, had always made welcome the little figure in black, wearing a mushroom hat and carrying a long tortoise-shell stick, who from time to time appeared among the alleys and under the flowery pergolas of a veritable fairyland of trees and turf and shrubs and blossoms.