and, if they
did occasionally vanish, sometimes to Cowes, sometimes to Switzerland,
sometimes to Norway, they always wrote to their wives, and always
alluded to their immediate or approaching return; and their letters
gracefully contributed to the fund of domestic amusement.

And yet it would be difficult to find a fairer scene than Brentham
offered, especially in the lustrous effulgence of a glorious English
summer. It was an Italian palace of freestone; vast, ornate, and in
scrupulous condition; its spacious and graceful chambers filled with
treasures of art, and rising itself from statued and stately terraces.
At their foot spread a gardened domain of considerable extent, bright
with flowers, dim with coverts of rare shrubs, and musical with
fountains. Its limit reached a park, with timber such as the midland
counties only can produce. The fallow deer trooped among its ferny
solitudes and gigantic oaks; but, beyond the waters of the broad and
winding lake, the scene became more savage, and the eye caught the dark
forms of the red deer on some jutting mount, shrinking with scorn from
communion with his gentler brethren.

CHAPTER 2

Lothair was the little boy whom the duchess remembered. He was a
posthumous child, and soon lost a devoted mother. His only relation was
one of his two guardians, a Scotch noble--a Presbyterian and a Whig.
This uncle was a widower with some children, but they were girls, and,
though Lothair was attached to them, too young to be his companions.
Their father was a keen, hard man, honorable and just but with no
softness of heart or manner. He guarded with precise knowledge and with
unceasing vigilance over Lothair's vast inheritance, which was in many
counties and in more than one kingdom; but he educated him in a Highland
home, and when he had reached boyhood thought fit to send him to the
High School of Edinburgh. Lothair passed a monotonous, if not a dull,
life; but he found occasional solace in the scenes of a wild and
beautiful nature, and delight in all the sports of the field and forest,
in which he was early initiated and completely indulged. Although an
Englishman, he was fifteen before he re-visited his country, and then
his glimpses of England were brief, and to him scarcely satisfactory. He
was hurried sometimes to vast domains, which he heard were his own; and
sometimes whisked to the huge metropolis, where he was shown St. Paul's
and the British-Museum. These visits lef