sequel, or second volume?

But let us go downstairs also.




CHAPTER III.


Breakfast was laid in the "Chinese room," a room which formed part of
the stately "garden front," added to the original structure of the house
in the eighteenth century by a Boyce whose wife had money. The
decorations, especially of the domed and vaulted roof, were supposed by
their eighteenth century designer to be "Oriental"; they were, at any
rate, intricate and overladen; and the figures of mandarins on the worn
and discoloured wall-paper had, at least, top-knots, pigtails, and
petticoats to distinguish them from the ordinary Englishmen of 1760,
besides a charming mellowness of colour and general effect bestowed on
them by time and dilapidation. The marble mantelpiece was elaborately
carved in Chinamen and pagodas. There were Chinese curiosities of a
miscellaneous kind on the tables, and the beautiful remains of an Indian
carpet underfoot. Unluckily, some later Boyce had thrust a crudely
Gothic sideboard, with an arched and pillared front, adapted to the
purposes of a warming apparatus, into the midst of the mandarins, which
disturbed the general effect. But with all its original absurdities, and
its modern defacements, the room was a beautiful and stately one.
Marcella stepped into it with a slight unconscious straightening of her
tall form. It seemed to her that she had never breathed easily till
now, in the ample space of these rooms and gardens.