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 new villa. The
front door in the new part was reached by a flight of dazzling
white steps.
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