"You must have some decent clothes," Lady Garribardine had said, a week or two beforehand, "another evening dress and an afternoon frock. I think I should like the first to be white and the other black, and in your own excellent taste. You will dine down every night as a guest, and we shall stay from Saturday until Tuesday."
"It is extremely exciting for me," Katherine admitted. "I wonder so much what the house will be like."
"It is a huge Palladian Monument, very splendid and ducal, everything is on an immense scale, and the Duke keeps it up with great state. It is more like some royal residence than a house, but there are some cosy rooms to be found in odd corners. It will interest and educate you, child. You had better read up all about it in one of the old volumes of Country Life—some three years ago, I think, it was described."
Katherine lost no time in doing this, and read of its building in 1680, and of its wonderful gardens "in the French style"—and of its superb collections of pictures and art treasures, and of its avenues and lake and waterways and fountains. Yes, it must be a very noble place.
They were to arrive early in time for luncheon, since Her Ladyship was to act hostess to the party who would come in the afternoon. And when they approached the gates, Katherine felt that one of the supreme moments in her life had come.
The park was vast, larger even than Blissington, and with more open spaces, and the house could be viewed from a distance—a symmetrical, magnificent pile. And it seemed that they walked through an endless succession of halls and great salons, until they were ushered into the Duke's presence in his own particular panelled room.
It was very lofty and partly filled with bookcases arranged in rather an unusual way, sunk into the wall itself, with very beautiful decorations by Grinling Gibbons surrounding them and also the intervening panels wherein fine pictures hung. The curtains and chair coverings were of the most superb old blue silk, faded now to a wonderful greenish tone, and harmonizing with the beautiful Savonnerie carpet with its soft tints of citron and puce and green.
Katherine was frankly awed. Blissington was a very fine gentleman's house—but this was a palace. And suddenly, the Duke seemed a million miles away from her, and she wondered how she had ever dared to be familiar with him, and rebuke him for coming to her schoolroom to talk!
She was meek as a mouse, and never opened her lips after the first words of greeting.
The host had come forward with cordial graciousness and bidden them welcome, and he had looked a very magnificent person somehow in his morning country riding clothes. And all the glamour of high rank and power and fastidiousness enhanced his natural charms, so that Katherine felt a little cold and sick with the emotion which she was experiencing. He was courtly and aloof in his manner with all his kindness, and in a moment or two he accompanied them along to the Venetian suite himself.