Salome

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, JoAnn Greenwood, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

MAPLESTONE COURT was a pretty, spacious, and comfortable English home. The house was built of old red brick, which took a deep, rich colour in the rays of the western sun as it shone upon the wide porch and the many windows. Before the house there was a wide expanse of emerald turf, skirted by stately trees; and this lawn was not cut up into flower-beds, but rolled and shaven close, so that the dark shadows of the trees lay upon it in unbroken masses morning and evening.
To the right of the house the ground sloped gently down to what was called by courtesy a river, though it was but a little rippling stream, which had taken many curves and windings, and just below Maplestone had made for itself a deep basin, called by the same courtesy a lake.
Lake or pond, mere or tarn, this was a delightful refuge in sultry noon-tide. Here the water-lilies rocked themselves to sleep; here the plumy ferns hung over the crystal depths; and here the children of Maplestone Court brought their small craft of every shape and size to sail across from one side to the other of the lake, often to make shipwreck amongst the reeds and lilies, sometimes to sink in the clear water!
A rude wooden bridge crossed the stream just above the lake; and several seats, made of twisted boughs and ornamented with the large cones of the firs which shut in Maplestone at the back, were to be found here and there on the banks.
On one of these seats, on a hot August day, Salome was half-sitting, half-lying, looking dreamily down upon the water. Her wide straw hat was lying at her feet, a book with the leaves much crumpled was in the crown. One little foot hung down from the bench; the other was curled up under her in a fashion known and abhorred by all governesses and those who think the figure of a girl of fifteen is of greater importance than careless ease of position like Salome's at this moment.