as he was to the grapery, peach-walls, and terraces of the grander
one. In his eyes it was all one place. The Small House belonged to
his master, as indeed did the very furniture within it; and it was
lent, not let, to Mrs Dale. Hopkins, perhaps, did not love Mrs Dale,
seeing that he owed her no duty as one born a Dale. The two young
ladies he did love, and also snubbed in a very peremptory way
sometimes. To Mrs Dale he was coldly civil, always referring to the
squire if any direction worthy of special notice as concerning the
garden was given to him.

All this will serve to explain the terms on which Mrs Dale was living
at the Small House,--a matter needful of explanation sooner or later.
Her husband had been the youngest of three brothers, and in many
respects the brightest. Early in life he had gone up to London, and
there had done well as a land surveyor. He had done so well that
Government had employed him, and for some three or four years he had
enjoyed a large income, but death had come suddenly on him, while he
was only yet ascending the ladder; and, when he died, he had hardly
begun to realise the golden prospects which he had seen before him.
This had happened some fifteen years before our story commenced, so
that the two girls hardly retained any memory of their father. For
the first five years of her widowhood, Mrs Dale, who had never been
a favourite of the squire's, lived with her two little girls in such
modest way as her very limited means allowed. Old Mrs Dale, the
squire's mother, then occupied the Small House. But when old Mrs Dale
died, the squire offered the place rent-free to his sister-in-law,
intimating to her that her daughters would obtain considerable social
advantages by living at Allington. She had accepted the offer, and
the social advantages had certainly followed. Mrs Dale was poor, her
whole income not exceeding three hundred a year, and therefore her