She might have travelled many a mile, too, even through beautiful England, without beholding such a scene. Overhead, the sky, clear and pure in the late summer, or the early autumn, seemed but of a deeper blue, because flecked here and there with wind-swept streaks of misty white. Around her glowed, in Nature’s gaudiest patch-work, all the garden beauty that had survived July. On a lower level by a few inches lay a smooth, trim bowling-green, dotted with its unfinished game; and downward still, foot by foot, like a wide green staircase, row after row of terraces were banked, and squared, and spread between their close-cut black yew hedges, till they descended to the ivy-grown wall that divided pleasure-ground from park. Here, slopes of tufted grass, swelling into bolder outlines as they receded, rolled, like the volume of a freshening sea, into knolls, and dips, and ridges, feathered in waving fern—dotted with goodly oaks—traversed by deep, narrow glades, in which the deer were feeding—shy, wild, and undisturbed. Beyond this, again, the variegated plain, rich in orchards, hedgerows, and enclosures studded with shocks of corn, seamed too by the silver of more than one glistening stream, was girdled by a belt of purple moorland; while, in the far distance, the horizon was shut in by a long low range of hills, lost in a grey-blue vapour, where they melted into sky. Behind her stood the grim and weatherworn mansion, with its thick stone walls, dented, battered, and defaced, as if it had defied a thousand tempests and more than one siege, which, indeed, was the fact. Every old woman in the country-side could tell how the square grey keep, at the end of the south wing, had resisted the Douglas, and there was no mistaking Cromwell’s handwriting on more than one rent in the comparatively modern portions of the building. Hamilton Hill, though it had never been called a fort, a castle, or even a hall, was known far and wide for a stronghold, that, well supplied and garrisoned, might keep fifty miles of the surrounding district in check; and the husband of Cerise was now lord of Hamilton Hill.