Midwinter: Certain Travellers in Old England. Buchan John

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СКАЧАТЬ trotted out of the wrought-iron gates, which bounded the pleasance, into the wide spaces of the park. Her talk, which at first had been the agreeable prattle of dinner, to which he responded with sufficient ease, changed gradually to interrogatories. With some disquiet he realised that she was drifting towards politics.

      "What do they think in France of the young man's taste in womankind?" she asked.

      He raised his eyebrows.

      "The Prince—Charles Stuart—the Chevalier. What of Jenny Cameron?"

      "We heard nothing of her in Paris, madam. You should be the better informed, for he has been some months on British soil."

      "Tush, we hear no truth from the North. But they say that she never leaves him, that she shares his travelling carriage. Is she pretty, I wonder? Dark or fair?"

      "That I cannot tell, but, whatever they be, her charms must be mature. I have heard on good authority that she is over forty years old."

      It did not need the Duchess's merry laughter to tell him that he had been guilty of a bêtise. He blushed furiously.

      "La, sir," she cried, "you are ungallant. That is very much my own age, and the world does not call me matronly. I had thought you a courtier, but I fear—I gravely fear—you are an honest man."

      They were now on the west side of the park, where a road led downhill past what had once been a quarry, but was now carved into a modish wilderness. The scarps of stone had been fashioned into grottos and towers and fantastic pinnacles; shrubs had been planted to make shapely thickets; springs had been turned to cascades or caught in miniature lakes. The path wound through midget Alps, which were of the same scale and quality as the chaise and the cream ponies and the shepherdess Duchess.

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