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 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.  From this, a veranda ran across the front of the cottage, its rustic posts supporting rose-trees and ivy.  On the cottage side appeared an old garden, but the new wing was surrounded by lawns and decorated with carpet bedding.  A gravel walk divided the old from the new, and intersected the garden.  At the back, Susan noted again the high brick wall surrounding the half-completed mansion.  Above this rose tall trees, and the wall itself was overgrown with ivy.  It apparently was old and concealed an unfinished palace of the sleeping beauty, so ragged and wild appeared the growth which peeped over the guardian wall.

With a quickness of perception unusual in her class, Susan took all this in, then rang the bell.  There was no back door, so far as she could see, and she thought it best to enter as she had done in the morning.  But the large fat woman who opened the door gave her to understand that she had taken a liberty.