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Beside her, on a tapestried stool, a young girl, with long fair hair hanging in braids down her back, was embroidering an altar-cloth. There was a pensive expression in her eyes, and it was easy to see that she was dreaming, while her agile fingers flew over her work.

The traditionary customs of golden-hearted antiquity, its feudal hospitalities, and lordly wassailings, have passed away with the baronial castles and stately manor-houses in which they were celebrated. They comported with the shadowy hall, the great oaken gallery, and the tapestried parlor, but are unfitted to the light showy saloons and gay drawing-rooms of the modern villa.

The peculiar dress in which he had been attired in better days showed only miserable rags of its whimsical finery, the lack of which was oddly supplied by the remnants of tapestried hangings, window-curtains, and shreds of pictures with which he had bedizened his tatters.

At the Palazzo Rosso they were invited to write their names and nationality in the visitors' book; and then a silver-haired, soft-voiced, gentle-mannered servitor in livery led them up the grand marble staircase and through an endless suite of airy, stately rooms rooms with floors of polished concrete, displaying elaborate patterns, with tapestried walls and frescoed ceilings, with sparse but ancient and precious articles of furniture, chandeliers of Venetian glass, Venetian mirrors, and innumerable paintings, many of them portraits.

Viviers ancient capital of the Vivarais, to which it gave the name is most romantically placed on the side of a craggy hill, its ancient castle and old Romanesque cathedral conspicuous above the house-roofs. Just above the verdant river-bank run its mediaeval ramparts tapestried with ivy, the yellowish stone almost the colour of the rocks. The scenery here is wild and striking.

Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit, tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has come to him at last have they not the very echo in them of what such weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?

The old Marquise, during the cold weather, always sat in her bedroom; and there, between the tapestried four-poster and the fireplace, the family grouped itself around the ground-glass of her single carcel lamp.

"You don't know your lessons to-day of course, and I am so well up in mine that I shall not be able to answer a single word; so come away with me to this quiet nook at the end of the passage and let us enjoy a cosy talk." The "quiet nook" referred to was a recess at the hall window, partitioned off by a drapery of tapestried curtains.

So saying, Florine led her into a small room; with fireplace and carpet, and made her sit down in a tapestried armchair by the side of a good fire. Georgette and Hebe had been dismissed, and Florine was left alone in care of the house. When her guest was seated, Florine said to her with an air of interest: "Will you not take anything? A little orange flower-water and sugar, warm."

When I met her in London at Lord Houghton's breakfast-table, she did not impress me so singularly; for the morning light is more prosaic than the dim illumination of their great tapestried drawing-room; and besides, sitting next to her, she did not have occasion to raise her voice in speaking, and I was not sensible what a slender voice she has.