On their drive the orders were to follow the private roads, and as the villas around the entire lake connected with one another, they were obliged to use the high-roads but little. Each of the places had a story, and none of these lost anything in Dolly’s dramatic rendering.
From the lower end of the lake they drove to Sunbury, the village--commonplace, but Colonial, Dolly explained--and through it. Taking the ridge road back of the hills, they approached another group of the country places. The houses of these estates belonged to an older day than those of the lake itself. Their type indicated the descent from the earlier simplicity of the Colonial, and afforded a melancholy reminder of the architectural experiments following the period of the Civil War.
"Our families have been coming out here for a hundred years," observed Dolly. "These dreadful French roofs we have been passing, give you the latest dates on this side of the ridge." As she spoke they approached a house of brown sandstone set in an ellipse of heavy spruces.
"This was the Roger Morgan place. Mrs. Morgan, Bertha, was our half-sister, dear, the only child of my father’s first marriage--she died seven years ago. This villa belongs to Fritzie Venable. She was Roger Morgan’s niece. But she hasn’t opened it for years--she just keeps a caretaker here and makes her home with Imogene. To me, spruces are depressing."
"And what is that?" asked Alice, indicating an ivy-covered pile of stone in the midst of a cluster of elms at some distance to the left of the house and on a hill above it. "How odd and pretty!"
"Of course," assented Dolly, less enthusiastically. "Do you really want to see it?"
It was Alice’s turn to be interested: "Why, yes, if we may. How quaint-looking," she pursued, scrutinizing the façade.
"It is, in fact, a mediæval style," said Dolly.
The car was turned into the driveway leading up to the chapel. When the two women had alighted and walked up the steps to the porch, Alice found the building larger than it had appeared from below the Morgan house.
Dolly led the way within. "It really is a beautiful thing," she sighed as they entered. "A reproduction in part--this interior--of a little church in Rome, that Mrs. Morgan was crazy about, Santa Maria in--dear me, I never can remember, Santa Maria in something or other. But I want you to look at this balustrade, and to walk up into one of these ambones. Can’t you see some dark-faced Savonarola preaching from one on the sins of society?" Dolly ascended the steps of one ambone as she spoke, while Alice walked up into the other.