that there is nothing between the dining-room windows and the iron rail but a narrow edge rather than border, and a little path made with round fixed cobble stones, not above two feet broad, into which no one but the gardener ever makes his way. The distance from the road to the house is not above five or six feet, and the entrance from the gate is shut in by a covered way. But the garden behind the house, on to which the windows from the drawing-room open, is to all the senses as private as though there were no village of Allington, and no road up to the church within a hundred yards of the lawn. The steeple of the church, indeed, can be seen from the lawn, peering, as it were, between the yew-trees which stand in the corner of the churchyard adjoining to Mrs Dale’s wall. But none of the Dale family have any objection to the sight of that steeple. The glory of the Small House at Allington certainly consists in its lawn, which is as smooth, as level, and as much like velvet as grass has ever yet been made to look. Lily Dale, 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 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 own style of living was of necessity very unassuming; but she saw her girls becoming popular in the county, much liked by the families around them, and enjoying nearly all the advantages which would have accrued to them had they been the daughters of Squire Dale of Allington. Under such circumstances it was little to her whether or no she were loved by her brother-in-law, or respected by Hopkins. Her own girls loved her, and respected her, and that was pretty much all that she demanded of the world on her own behalf.
And Uncle Christopher had been very good to the girls in his own obstinate and somewhat ungracious manner. There were two ponies in the stables of the Great House, which they were allowed to ride, and which, unless on occasions, nobody else did ride. I think he might have given the ponies to the girls, but he thought differently. And he contributed to their dresses, sending them home now and again things which he thought necessary, not in the pleasantest way in the world. Money he never gave them, nor did he make them any promises. But they were Dales, and he loved them; and with Christopher Dale to love once was to love always. Bell was his chief favourite, sharing with his nephew Bernard the best warmth of his heart. About these two he had his projects, intending that Bell should be the future mistress of the Great House of Allington; as to which project, however, Miss Dale was as yet in very absolute ignorance.
We may now, I think, go back to our four friends, as they walked out upon the lawn. They were understood to be on a mission to assist Mrs Dale in the picking of the peas; but pleasure intervened in the way of business, and the young people, forgetting the labours of their elder, allowed themselves to be carried away by the fascinations of croquet. The iron hoops and the sticks were fixed. The mallets and the balls were lying about; and then the party was so nicely made up! “I haven’t had a game of croquet yet,” said Mr Crosbie. It cannot be said that he had lost much time, seeing that he had only arrived before dinner on the preceding day. And then the mallets were in their hands in a moment.
“We’ll play sides, of course,” said Lily. “Bernard and I’ll play together.” But this was not allowed. Lily was well known to be the queen of the croquet ground; and as Bernard was supposed to be more efficient than his friend, Lily had to take Mr Crosbie as her partner. “Apollo can’t get through the hoops,” Lily said afterwards to her sister; “but then how gracefully he fails to do it!” Lily, however, had been beaten, and may therefore be excused for a little spite against her partner. But it so turned out that before Mr Crosbie took his final departure from Allington he could get through the hoops; and Lily, though she was still queen of the croquet ground, had to acknowledge a male sovereign in that dominion.
“That’s not the way we played at—” said Crosbie, at one point of the game, and then stopped himself.
“Where was that?” said Bernard.
“A place I was at last summer,—in Shropshire.”
“Then they don’t play the game, Mr Crosbie, at the place you were at last summer,—in Shropshire,” said Lily.
“You mean Lady Hartletop’s,” said Bernard. Now, the Marchioness of Hartletop was a very great person indeed, and a leader in the fashionable world.
“Oh! Lady Hartletop’s!” said Lily. “Then I suppose we must give in;” which little bit of sarcasm was not lost upon Mr Crosbie, and was put down by him in the tablets of his mind as quite undeserved. He had endeavoured to avoid any mention of Lady Hartletop and her croquet ground, and her ladyship’s name had been forced upon him. Nevertheless, he liked Lily Dale through it all. But he thought that he liked Bell the best, though she said little; for Bell was the beauty of the family.
During the game Bernard remembered that they had especially come over to bid the three ladies to dinner at the house on that day. They had all dined there on the day before, and the girls’ uncle had now sent directions to them to come again. “I’ll go and ask mamma about it,” said Bell, who was out first. And then she returned, saying, that she and her sister would obey their uncle’s behest; but that her mother would prefer to remain at home. “There are the peas to be eaten, you know,” said Lily.
“Send them up to the Great House,” said Bernard.
“Hopkins