His Other Wife: A Novel — page 23: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SLEEPING BEAUTY. 15 forest trees, while beneath them a scft gloom, as of slowly- coming twilight, made tender mystery. A lazy wind stirred overhead, and filled the voluptuous air with the scent of orange groves lying close about the white villa that nestled its wings in the luxuriance of tropical shrubbery that was over a hundred years old. At a light, swinging pace, Warren traversed the lovely sketch of woodland that lay between the city and the lake shore on which the Lucerne mansion stood. A miniature of the famous Swiss water was the small lagoon that now reflected the after-glow of sunset. Resisting his impulse to pause on the steep banks of myrtle trees that inclosed the lake, Warren hastened along the winding walk that led to a broad, paved veranda in front of the building. A cornice of ivy fringed the low eaves of the piazza and climbed about the slender stone columns, giving an appearance of greater antiquity to the quaint, half-medizval architecture of the building. Cool- ness and profound quiet were the most noticeable in- fluences of the scene. No sound of human or animal life troubled the evening hush, that was dream-like and | vague. _ The visitor felt himself strangely spelled by the utter silence that reigned without and within the closed shutters. He had a reluctance to touch the heavy silver knocker on the hall door, lest the sound thereof might startle ghosts of a vanished time from out the labyrinthine arcades of the aged lime trees. ; | | . And then he remembered, with a pang, that his presence EComicbooks:co im =)