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