Gay, joyous sunsets; light
laughter; delicate feasting in Renard's garden, hard by the Tuileries. To
remember that fairer and different scene was to recall the freshness of
youth, the romance of a first love.
Here in the Mall there was gaiety enough and to spare. A crowd of fine
people that sometimes thickened to a mob, hustled by the cits and
starveling poets who came to stare at them.
Yet, since St. James's Park was fashion's favourite promenade, Lady Fareham
affected it, and took a turn or two nearly every evening, alighting from
her chair at one gate and returning to it at another, on her way to rout
or dance. She took Angela with her; and De Malfort and Sir Denzil were
generally in attendance upon them, Denzil's devotion stopping at nothing
except a proposal of marriage, for which he had not mustered courage in a
friendship that had lasted half a year.
"Because there was one so favoured as Endymion, am I to hope for the moon
to come down and give herself to me?" he said one day, when Lady Fareham
rebuked him for his reticence. "I know your sister does not love me; yet I
hang on, hoping that love will come suddenly, like the coming of spring,
which is ever a surprise.
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