E-text prepared by David Edwards, Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from scanned images of public domain material generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com/) Note: Images of the original pages are available through the the Google Books Library Project. See http://books.google.com/books?vid=OG3tBIK-KHsC&id Transcriber's note: The oe-ligature is represented by [oe]. A HOUSE-PARTY Don Gesualdo and A Rainy June by OUIDA Author Of "Othmar," "Princess Napeaxine," "Under Two Flags," "Wanda," Etc., Etc. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. 1902. A HOUSE-PARTY. CHAPTER I. It is an August morning. It is an old English manor-house. There is a breakfast-room hung with old gilded leather of the times of the Stuarts; it has oak furniture of the same period; it has leaded lattices with stained glass in some of their frames, and the motto of the house in old French, "J'ay bon vouloir," emblazoned there with the crest of a heron resting in a crown. Thence, windows open on to a green, quaint, lovely garden, which was laid out by Monsieur Beaumont when he planned the gardens of Hampton Court. There are clipped yew-tree walks and arbors and fantastic forms; there are stone terraces and steps like those of Haddon, and there are peacocks which pace and perch upon them; there are beds full of all the flowers which blossomed in the England of the Stuarts, and birds dart and butterflies pass above them; there are huge old trees, cedars, lime, hornbeam; beyond the gardens there are the woods and grassy lawns of the home park. The place is called Surrenden Court, and is one of the houses of George, Earl of Usk,--his favorite house in what pastoral people call autumn, and what he calls the shooting season.