a row of shops filled with the
necessaries of civilization; and round the corner, an aggressively new
church of yellow brick with a tin roof and a wooden steeple stood in
the middle of an untilled space. At the end of one street a glimpse
could be caught of the waste country beyond, not yet claimed by the
ferry-builder. A railway embankment bulked against the horizon, and
closed the view in an unsightly manner. Rexton was as ugly as it was
new.

Losing her way, Susan came to the ragged fringe of country environing
the new suburb, and paused there, to take in her surroundings. Across
the fields to the left she saw an unfinished mansion, large and
stately, rising amidst a forest of pines. This was girdled by a high
brick wall which looked older than the suburb itself. Remembering that
she had seen this house behind the cottage of Miss Loach, the girl used
it as a landmark, and turning down a side street managed to find the
top of a crooked lane at the bottom of which Rose Cottage was situated.
This lane showed by its very crookedness that it belonged to the
ancient civilization of the district. Here were no paths, no lamps, no
aggressively new fences and raw brick houses. Susan, stepping down the
slight incline, passed into quite an old world, smacking of the
Georgian times, leisurely and quaint. On either side of the lane,
old-fashioned cottages, with whitewash walls and thatched roofs, stood
amidst gardens filled with unclipped greenery and homely flowers.
Quickset hedges, ragged and untrimmed, divided these from the roadway,
and to add to the rural look one garden possessed straw bee-hives.
Here and there rose ancient elm-trees and grass grew in the roadway.
It was a blind lane and terminated in a hedge, which bordered a field
of corn. To the left was a narrow path running between hedges past the
cottages and into the country.

Miss Loach's house was a mixture of old and new. Formerly it had been
an unpretentious cottage like the others, but she had added a new wing
of red brick built in the most approved style of the jerry-builder, and
looking like the villas in the more modern parts of Rexton. The
crabbed age and the uncultured youth of the old and new portions,
planted together cheek by jowl, appeared like ill-coupled clogs and
quite out of harmony. The thatched and tiled roofs did not seem meet
neighbors, and the whitewash walls of the old-world cottage looked
dingy beside the glaring redness of the