Colin by E.F. Benson — Read

For many years now with Philip Yardley a widower and his mother old, Stanier had withdrawn itself from the splendour of its traditional hospitalities, but now with the installation of Violet and Colin there, on their return from Italy, it blossomed out again into lavish and magnificent flower. Throughout November a succession of parties assembled there for the pheasant shooting, and in the early frosts of that December the wild fowl, snipe and duck and teal in the marshes, and the unprecedented abundance of woodcock in the park, gave an added lustre to the battues. In the evening, after an hour's concert, or some theatrical entertainment for which the artists had come from London or Paris, the band reassembled in the long gallery, and dancing kept the windows bright almost till the rising of the late dawn.

There were many foreign royalties in England that year, and none left without a visit to Stanier, accompanied by cousins of the English house. Stanier, in fact, opened its doors, as in the days before the stroke fell on Philip's father, and fairly outshone its own records for magnificence. Colossal in extravagance, there was yet nothing insensate in its splendour; it shone, not for purposes of dazzling, but only as reasserting its inherent and historical gorgeousness.