The influence of all these delightful objects and of this benign atmosphere on the frame and mind of Venetia had been considerable.  After the excitement of the last year of her life, and the harassing and agitating scenes with which it closed, she found a fine solace in this fair land and this soft sky, which the sad perhaps can alone experience.  Its repose alone afforded a consolatory contrast to the turbulent pleasure of the great world.  She looked back upon those glittering and noisy scenes with an aversion which was only modified by her self-congratulation at her escape from their exhausting and contaminating sphere.  Here she recurred, but with all the advantages of a change of scene, and a scene so rich in novel and interesting associations, to the calm tenor of those days, when not a thought ever seemed to escape from Cherbury and its spell-bound seclusion.  Her books, her drawings, her easel, and her harp, were now again her chief pursuits; pursuits, however, influenced by the genius of the land in which she lived, and therefore invested with a novel interest; for the literature and the history of the country naturally attracted her attention; and its fair aspects and sweet sounds, alike inspired her pencil and her voice.  She had, in the society of her mother, indeed, the advantage of communing with a mind not less refined and cultivated than her own.  Lady Annabel was a companion whose conversation, from reading and reflection, was eminently suggestive; and their hours, though they lived in solitude, never hung heavy.  They were always employed, and always cheerful.  But Venetia was not more than cheerful.  Still very young, and gifted with an imaginative and therefore sanguine mind, the course of circumstances, however, had checked her native spirit, and shaded a brow which, at her time of life and with her temperament, should have been rather fanciful than pensive.  If Venetia, supported by the disciplined energies of a strong mind, had schooled herself into not looking back to the past with grief, her future was certainly not tinged with the Iris pencil of Hope.  It seemed to her that it was her fate that life should bring her no happier hours than those she now enjoyed.  They did not amount to exquisite bliss.  That was a conviction which, by no process of reflection, however ingenious, could she delude herself to credit.  Venetia struggled to take refuge in content, a mood of mind perhaps less natural than it should be to one so young, so gifted, and so fair!

Their villa was surrounded by a garden in the ornate and artificial style of the country.  A marble terrace overlooked the lake, crowned with many a statue and vase that held the aloe.  The laurel and the cactus, the cypress and the pine, filled the air with their fragrance, or charmed the eye with their rarity and beauty:  the walks were festooned with the vine, and they could raise their hands and pluck the glowing fruit which screened them, from the beam by which, it was ripened.  In this enchanted domain Venetia might be often seen, a form even fairer than the sculptured nymphs among which she glided, catching the gentle breeze that played upon the surface of the lake, or watching the white sail that glittered in the sun as it floated over its purple bosom.