And he laughed again to see that she took him seriously.
The gardens were very lovely, and much less orderly than the quadrangle. Following Disraeli's dictum, they had been cultivated to excess, and then Nature had been allowed to decivilize them. The result was charming, and wonderfully artistic. There were beds of brilliant flowers, wherein slim saplings grew at will; statues of god and goddess wreathed in greenery; ponds of placid water rimmed with stone, wherein white lilies slept on broad leaves, floating amidst slender reeds. The façade of the house, with its Tudor battlements and long ranges of latticed windows, rose picturesquely in the still, calm light of the moon, which rendered all things ethereal and fairylike. Before the mansion stretched a shallow terrace of gray stone, diapered with lichens and emerald moss. A wide flight of steps descended from this to meet a broad path, which melted imperceptibly into a jungle of tall bushes and wiry grasses. And all around the trees sprang like sentinels to guard this magic domain from the prose of the outside world. Everything was bathed in a luminous white radiance--and in this colorless world Mavis flitted here and there like a moth of snow.
"It is too lovely for mere words," murmured Gerald, gazing at all this beauty, with his poetical feelings uppermost.
"Are you speaking of me?" asked Mavis joyfully.
He laughed. "In spite of your seclusion, my dear, you are a true woman, for you will not allow even the landscape to be complimented when you are present."
"Human beings are so much nicer than landscape," she pouted.
"One is, at least. I wonder who she can be."
"Me," said Mavis triumphantly.
"How clever of you to guess that, my angel."
Mavis flung up her arms with a silvery laugh. "I am a fairy to-night, and no angel. They are stiff things with goose wings."