Part Two Chapter 1 Stoneleigh

The season is June; the time fourteen years prior to the commencement of this story, and the place an old garden in Wales, about half way between Bangor and the suspension bridge across Menai Straits. The garden, which was very large, must have been beautiful, in the days when money was more plenty with the proprietor than at present; but now there were marks of neglect and decay everywhere, and in some parts of it the shrubs, and vines, and roses were mixed together in so hopeless a tangle that to separate them seemed impossible, while the yew trees, of which there were several, grew dark, and thick, and untrimmed, and cast heavy shadows upon the grass plats near them. The central part of the garden, however, showed signs of care.

The broad gravel walk was clean and smooth, and the straight borders beside it were full of summer flowers, among which roses were conspicuous. Indeed, there were roses everywhere, for Anthony loved them as if they were his children, and so did the white-faced invalid indoors, whose room old Dorothy, Anthony's wife, kept filled with the freshest and choicest. It did not matter to her that the sick man had wandered very far from the path of duty, and was dying from excessive dissipation; he was her pride, her boy, whom she had tended from his babyhood, and whom she would watch over and care for to the last. She had defended and stood by him, when he brought home a pretty little brown-eyed, brown haired creature, whose only fault was her poverty and the fact that she was a chorus singer in the operas in London, where Hugh McPherson had seen and fallen in love with her.