‘I’ll ask him: he gave it to me.’
‘Dressing his new doll,’ thought Theodora; but as Violet had not been personally guilty of the extravagance, she thought amends due to her for the injustice, and asked her to come into the gardens.
‘Thank you, I should like it; but will he, will Mr.—will Arthur know what has become of me?’
‘He saw you join us,’ said Theodora, thinking he ought to be relieved to have her taken off his hands for a little while.
‘Have you seen the gardens?’ asked Jane.
‘Are not these the gardens?’ said Violet, surprised, as they walked on through the pleasure-ground, and passed a screen of trees, and a walk trellised over with roses.
There spread out before her a sweep of shaven turf, adorned with sparkling jets d’eau of fantastic forms, gorgeous masses of American plants, the flaming or the snowy azalea, and the noble rhododendron, in every shade of purple cluster among its evergreen leaves; beds of rare lilies, purely white or brilliant with colour; roses in their perfection of bloom; flowers of forms she had never figured to herself, shaded by wondrous trees, the exquisite weeping deodara, the delicate mimosa, the scaly Himalaya pines, the feathery gigantic ferns of the southern hemisphere.
Violet stood gazing in a silent trance till Arthur’s step approached, when she bounded back to him, and clinging to his arm exclaimed, so that he alone could hear, ‘Oh, I am glad you are come! It was too like enchanted ground!’
‘So you like it,’ said Arthur, smiling.
‘I did not know there could be anything so beautiful! I thought the pleasure-ground finer than anything—so much grander than Lord St. Erme’s; but this! Did you keep it to the last to surprise me!’