Title:  My Friend Prospero

Author:  Henry Harland

Release Date:  January 13, 2005 [EBook #14682]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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MY FRIEND PROSPERO

By HENRY HARLAND

Author of

The CARDINAL’S snuff-box. 
Illustrated by G.C.  Wilmshurst.
One Hundred and Fifth Thousand.

The lady Paramount.
Fifty-fifth Thousand.

Comedies and errors.
Third Edition.

Grey roses. Third Edition.

Mademoiselle miss. Second Edition.

JOHN LANE:  THE BODLEY HEAD

LONDON & NEW YORK.  MDCCCCIV

1903

PART FIRST

My Friend Prospero

I

The coachman drew up his horses before the castle gateway, where their hoofs beat a sort of fanfare on the stone pavement; and the footman, letting himself smartly down, pulled, with a peremptory gesture that was just not quite a swagger, the bronze hand at the end of the dangling bell-cord.

Seated alone in her great high-swung barouche, in the sweet April weather, Lady Blanchemain gave the interval that followed to a consideration of the landscape:  first, sleeping in shadowy stillness, the formal Italian garden, its terraced lawns and metrical parterres, its straight dark avenues of ilex, its cypresses, fountains, statues, balustrades; and then, laughing in the breeze and the sun, the wild Italian valley, a forest of blossoming fruit-trees, with the river winding and glinting in its midst, with olive-clad hills blue-grey at either side, and beyond the hills, peering over their shoulders, the snow-peaks of mountains, crisp against the sky, and in the level distance the hazy shimmer of the lake.

“It is lovely,” she exclaimed, fervently, in a whisper, “lovely.—­And only a generation of blind-worms,” was her after-thought, “could discern in it the slightest resemblance to the drop-scene of a theatre.”

II