PART FIRST




My Friend Prospero




I


The coachman drew up his horses before the castle gateway, where their
hoofs beat a sort of fanfare on the stone pavement; and the footman,
letting himself smartly down, pulled, with a peremptory gesture that was
just not quite a swagger, the bronze hand at the end of the dangling
bell-cord.

Seated alone in her great high-swung barouche, in the sweet April
weather, Lady Blanchemain gave the interval that followed to a
consideration of the landscape: first, sleeping in shadowy stillness,
the formal Italian garden, its terraced lawns and metrical parterres,
its straight dark avenues of ilex, its cypresses, fountains, statues,
balustrades; and then, laughing in the breeze and the sun, the wild
Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river