Chapter Forty
Lord Octavius showed her the rose garden and the water garden, the maze, the Chinese Folly with its tiers of funny peaked roofs, and then he took her to the bluebell dell. The feeling that she’d stepped into an enchanted England grew stronger. “My goodness,” Pip said, with a laugh. “I feel as if I’m inside a picture book. It’s too idyllic to be true!”
She wondered what words the Reverend Gilbert White would have used to describe this woodland dell—the slender birches with their upraised branches, the trembling green canopy of leaves, the dappled light and shade, the drifts of blue flowers.
They wandered hand in hand through the trees, climbed a gentle rise, and came upon another folly, one Octavius called the Bird’s Nest. It wasn’t as fanciful as the Chinese Folly, just a
