had made her feel for the first time what might be the sweetness of
dependence.

She sat up, brushed the bits of grass from her hair, and looked down on
the house where she held sway. It stood just below her, cheerless and
untended, its faded red front divided from the road by a "yard" with
a path bordered by gooseberry bushes, a stone well overgrown with
traveller's joy, and a sickly Crimson Rambler tied to a fan-shaped
support, which Mr. Royall had once brought up from Hepburn to please
her. Behind the house a bit of uneven ground with clothes-lines strung
across it stretched up to a dry wall, and beyond the wall a patch of
corn and a few rows of potatoes strayed vaguely into the adjoining
wilderness of rock and fern.

Charity could not recall her first sight of the house. She had been told
that she was ill of a fever when she was brought down from the Mountain;
and she could only remember waking one day in a cot at the foot of Mrs.
Royall's bed, and opening her eyes on the cold neatness of the room that
was afterward to be hers.

Mrs. Royall died seven or eight years later; and by that time Charity
had taken the measure of most things about her. She knew that Mrs.
Royall was sad and timid and weak; she knew that lawyer Royall was harsh
and violent, and still weaker. She knew that she had been christened
Charity (in the white church at the other end of the village) to
commemorate Mr. Royall's disinterestedness in "bringing her down," and
to keep alive in her a becoming sense of her dependence; she knew that
Mr. Royall was her guardian, but that he had not legally adopted her,
though everybody spoke of her as Charity Royall; and she knew why he had
come back to live at North Dormer, instead of practising at Nettleton,