Read "Lucius Davoren, Volume II" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was hardly one o'clock when they beheld the terraced gardens of Mardenholme; gardens that were worth a day's journey to see; a thoroughly Italian picture, set in a thoroughly English landscape; marble balustrades surmounting banks of flowers; tall spire-shaped conifers ranged at intervals, tier above tier; marble steps and marble basins, in every direction; and below this show-garden, sloping down to the river, a lawn of softest verdure, bordered by vast shrubberies, that to the stranger seemed pathless, yet where a fallen leaf could hardly have been found, so exquisite was the order of the grounds.
Geoffrey tied his boat to the lower branch of a mighty willow which dipped its green tresses in the stream, leaped out and landed his cousins as coolly as if he had arrived at an hotel. No mortal was to be seen for the first moment, but Jessie's sharp eyes beheld a white shirt-sleeve gleaming athwart a group of magnolias.