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'_I fear Life's many changes; not Death's changelessness_'
PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE LONDON
CHAPTER I. 1 CHAPTER II. 13 CHAPTER III. 19 CHAPTER IV. 29 CHAPTER V. 32 CHAPTER VI. 36 CHAPTER VII. 51 CHAPTER VIII. 59 CHAPTER IX. 70 CHAPTER X. 77 CHAPTER XI. 86 CHAPTER XII. 96 CHAPTER XIII. 105 CHAPTER XIV. 108 CHAPTER XV. 111 CHAPTER XVI. 117 CHAPTER XVII. 119 CHAPTER XVIII. 131 CHAPTER XIX. 142 CHAPTER XX. 148 CHAPTER XXI. 156 CHAPTER XXII. 160 CHAPTER XXIII. 168 CHAPTER XXIV. 172 CHAPTER XXV. 183 CHAPTER XXVI. 193 CHAPTER XXVII. 202 CHAPTER XXVIII. 207 CHAPTER XXIX. 215 CHAPTER XXX. 223 CHAPTER XXXI. 230 CHAPTER XXXII. 238 CHAPTER XXXIII. 249 CHAPTER XXXIV. 253 CHAPTER XXXV. 261 CHAPTER XXXVI. 274 CHAPTER XXXVII. 285 CHAPTER XXXVIII. 285 CHAPTER XXXIX. 300 CHAPTER XL. 302 CHAPTER XLI. 306 CHAPTER XLII. 312 CHAPTER XLIII. 321 CHAPTER XLIV. 335 CHAPTER XLV. 337 CHAPTER XLVI. 339 CHAPTER XLVII. 341 CHAPTER XLVIII. 346 CHAPTER XLIX. 354 CHAPTER L. 362 CHAPTER LI. 367 CHAPTER LII. 377 CHAPTER LIII. 382 CHAPTER LIV. 391
Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.
It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around those forests, in '_le pays de rire et de ne rien faire_,' from many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.