Still there was much to justify the term cottage.  The door, which looked southward on the road, was at the side of the building, and opened, not into a hall, but into the one large sitting-room, which was thirty feet long and twenty-five feet broad, and instead of a plaster ceiling there were massive joists, which Hope had gilded and painted till they were a sight to behold.  Another cottage feature:  the walls were literally clothed with verdure and color; in front, huge creeping geraniums, jasmine, and Virginia creepers hid the brick-work; and the western walls, to use the words of a greater painter than ourselves, were

“Quite overcanopied with lush woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine.”

In the next place, the building stood in a genuine cottage garden.  It was close to the road.  The southern boundary was plain oak paling, made of upright pieces which Hope had varnished so that the color was now a fine amber; the rest of the boundary was a quick-set hedge, in the western division of which stood an enormous oak-tree, hollow at the back.  And the garden was fair with humble flowers—­pinks, sweet-williams, crimson nasturtiums, double daisies, lilies, and tulips; but flower beds shared the garden with friendly cabbages, potatoes, onions, carrots, and asparagus.

To this humble but pleasant abode Hope conducted his daughter, and insisted upon her lying down on the sofa in the sitting-room.  Then he ordered the woman who kept the house for him to prepare the spare bedroom, which looked into the garden, and to cut some of the sweet-smelling flowers.  He himself had much to say to his daughter, and, above all, to demand her explanation of the awkward circumstances that had been just revealed.  But she had received a great shock, and, like most manly men, he had a great consideration for the weakness of women, and his paternal heart said, “Let her have an hour or two of absolute repose before I subject her to any trial whatever.”  So he opened the window to give her air, enjoining her most strictly not to move, and even to go to sleep if she could; and then he put on his shooting coat, with large inside pocket, to go and buy her a little wine—­a thing he never touched himself—­and what other humble delicacies the village afforded.  He walked briskly away from his door without the least idea that all his movements were watched from a hiding-place upon his own premises, no other than the great oak-tree, hollow and open at the back, in which Leonard Monckton had bored two peep-holes, and was now ensconced there watching him.

Hope had not gone many yards from his own door when he was confronted by one of those ruffians who, by their way of putting it, are the eternal butt of iniquitous people and iniquitous things, namely, honest men, curse them! and the law, confound it!  This was no other than that Ben Burnley, who, being a miner, had stuck half-way between Devonshire and Durham, and had been some months in Bartley’s mine.  He opened on Hope in a loud voice, and dialect which we despair of conveying with absolute accuracy.