Rose wished
she could give the difficult things--love, devotion, and self-sacrifice;
but she could not, or perhaps she had no opportunity. She was fond
of her stepsisters, but her most conscious affection was the one she
felt for her horse.
She left him at the stable and, fastening up her riding-skirt, she
walked slowly home. She had not far to go. A steep street, where
narrow-fronted old houses informed the public that apartments were to
be let within, brought her to the broad space of grass and trees
called The Green, which she had just passed on her horse. Straight
ahead of her was the wide street flanked by houses of which her home
was one--a low white building hemmed in on each side by another and
with a small walled garden in front of it; not a large house, but one
full of character and of quiet self-assurance. Malletts had lived in
it for several generations, long before the opposite houses were
built, long before the road had, lower down, degenerated into a region
of shops. These houses, all rechristened in a day of enthusiasm,
Nelson Lodge, with Trafalgar House, taller, bigger, but not so white,
on one side of it, and Hardy Cottage, somewhat smaller, on the other,
had faced open meadows in General Mallett's boyhood. Round the corner,
facing The Green, were a few contemporaries, and they all had a slight
look of disdain for the later comers, yet no single house was
flagrantly new. There was not a villa in sight and on The Green two
old stone monuments, to long-dead and long-forgotten warriors, kept
company with the old trees under which children were now playing,
while nurses wheeled perambulators on the bisecting paths.
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