A shaded shrubberied drive admitted them to the house where Voltaire lived so long and so peacefully, and which is now in the occupation of a gentleman who graciously allows it to be shown—rather ungraciously—by his major-domo. Lightly as Daphne had spoken of Voltaire, she was too keenly imaginative not to be interested in the house which any famous man had inhabited. Two quiet rooms, _salon_ and bed-chamber, looked into a short broad alley of trees, a garden, and summer-house perched high on the hillside, and commanding a wide prospect of fertile valley and gloomy mountain. All things in those two rooms were exactly as they had been in the great man’s lifetime; everything was exquisitely neat, and all the colours had faded to those delicate half-tints which the artistic soul loveth: faint grays and purples, fainter greens and fawn colours. Here was the narrow bed on which Voltaire slept, with its embroidered coverlet; chairs and _fauteuils_ covered with tapestry; walls upholstered with figured satin damask, pale with age; Lekain’s portrait over the bed; Madame du Châtelet’s opposite, where the great satirist’s cynical glance must have rested on it as he awakened from his slumbers. They all looked reverently at these things, hushed and subdued by the thought that they were amidst the surroundings of the dead; belongings that had once been familiar and precious to him who now slept the last long sleep in his vault at the Pantheon; where never-ending gangs of Cook’s tourists are perpetually being ushered into his mausoleum, and perpetually asking one another who was Voltaire? They loitered a little in the garden, wrote their names in a visitors’-book, and then went back to explore the village, and to take a modest luncheon of coffee and bread and butter, sour claret, and Gruyère cheese at one of the humble taverns, while the horses stood at ease before the door, and the driver refreshed himself modestly at the expense of his fare. They drove home to the hotel by a way which passed through a quaint village, and then skirted the lake, and which was somewhat more romantic than the country road by which they had come, and Daphne expressed herself satisfied, on the whole, with her first day in Switzerland. CHAPTER XXVI. ‘FORBID A LOVE AND IT IS TEN TIMES SO WODE.’ Sir Vernon showed himself especially gracious to his younger daughter and her lover next morning at breakfast, when the itinerary of their holiday was discussed. So far as his own pleasure was concerned, he would have liked nothing better than to go straight to Montreux, where a delightful villa, with a garden sloping to the lake, had been secured for his accommodation; but he did not forget that Daphne had seen nothing of Switzerland, and Edgar very little; and for their sakes he was ready to make considerable sacrifices.