taking pride in her own lawn, has declared often that it is no good attempting to play croquet up at the Great House.  The grass, she says, grows in tufts, and nothing that Hopkins, the gardener, can or will do has any effect upon the tufts.  But there are no tufts at the Small House.  As the squire himself has never been very enthusiastic about croquet, the croquet implements have been moved permanently down to the Small House, and croquet there has become quite an institution.

And while I am on the subject of the garden I may also mention Mrs Dale’s conservatory, as to which Bell was strenuously of opinion that the Great House had nothing to offer equal to it—­“For flowers, of course, I mean,” she would say, correcting herself; for at the Great House there was a grapery very celebrated.  On this matter the squire would be less tolerant than as regarded the croquet, and would tell his niece that she knew nothing about flowers.  “Perhaps not, Uncle Christopher,” she would say.  “All the same, I like our geraniums best;” for there was a spice of obstinacy about Miss Dale,—­as, indeed, there was in all the Dales, male and female, young and old.

It may be as well to explain that the care of this lawn and of this conservatory, and, indeed, of the entire garden belonging to the Small House, was in the hands of Hopkins, the head gardener to the Great House; and it was so simply for this reason, that Mrs Dale could not afford to keep a gardener herself.  A working lad, at ten shillings a week, who cleaned the knives and shoes, and dug the ground, was the only male attendant on the three ladies.  But Hopkins, the head gardener of Allington, who had men under him, was as widely awake to the lawn and the conservatory of the humbler establishment 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