They walked rapidly for a while, keeping always to the right, until they were out of sight and sound of the disturbing company, and then they dawdled from terrace to terrace; leaned over lichen-stained marble balustrades to see their reflections in the dark, silent pools; loitered on banks of mossy turf beneath the shade of towering trees; stopped to admire, to criticise, and not infrequently to laugh over the sculptures that dotted the way, and came out at length upon an128 avenue, long and straight and level and gleaming white in the afternoon sunshine.
“You want to see the Trianons, of course,” Grey suggested to the girl. “I know you are familiar with many of the events that took place there.”
And so, turning to the left, they sauntered on until they came to the one-story horse-shoe shaped villa that Louis XIV built for Madame de Maintenon. But Minna was tired of sight-seeing, and the porcelains and the pictures proved alike uninteresting. The Petit Trianon pleased her much better because of its associations with Marie Antoinette, who had been one of her school-girl heroines, and over its delightful English-looking garden she grew enthusiastic.
paths, dallied on the shore of the funny little artificial lake, and rested for a while in the “Temple de l’Amour.” The number of visitors, however, was to both of them a disturbing influence. They would have liked the place to themselves, but they were at every turn running into couples and parties whose presence, as Grey put it, “spoiled the picture.”
129 They had just emerged from that group of homely, quaint cottages in a far corner of the garden where the fair ladies of Louis’s Court were wont to play at peasant life, when the rippling laughter of women and the more hearty if less musical merriment of men broke jarringly upon their hearing.
“Can’t we have some milk at the vacherie Suisse?” Grey heard a woman’s voice ask in the English of the well-bred.
