For these and many other equally weighty reasons the contract was concluded, and true love, as Mrs. Brotherton remarked, carried the day--though her daughter might, no doubt, have looked higher. Ralph got a lieutenancy in the Yeomanry, which was a great thing. He was put upon the Commission of the Peace--a _faux air_ as of a country gentleman was thrown over him. After all whether a property is large or small it makes no difference in the principle of the thing, Mrs. Brotherton said. You would not put a man out of his natural rank and cease to consider him a squire because he had been obliged to part with a portion of his estate. This lady was something of an invalid, and a great deal of a casuist--it was her part in the family to explain everything and give the best of reasons. She was safe to produce a long list of arguments at ten minutes’ notice, fully justifying, and that on the highest grounds, whatever the others had decided to do. And she put forth all her strength in favour of Ralph Joscelyn, so that he ended by becoming a very fine gentleman, indeed a patrician of the purest water, a little subdued by circumstances, but blue in blood and princely in disposition like the best. The White House to which Lydia had been brought home, as was the custom then, on the evening of her wedding day, bore very much the same aspect at that period as at the time, five-and-thirty years later, at which this story opens. It was a gray stone house, gray and cold as the fells against which its square outline showed, roomy and old-fashioned if not perhaps quite carrying out the family brag. It stood upon one of the Tower slopes a little elevated above the road. Behind it at some little distance was a small wood of firs softening down into a fringe of trees less gloomy, in the little fissure, too small to be called a glen or even a ravine, nothing more than a cut in the hillside, where a little brook brawled downwards over its pebbles, on the west side of the house. Here there were some hawthorn bushes, big and gnarled and old, a few mountain ash-trees, and birches clinging to the sides of the narrow opening, some of them stooping across the little thread of water to which they formed a sort of fringe; and at one spot a very homely little bridge overshadowed by the birches which clustered together, dangling their delicate branches over the beck, the only pretty feature in the scene. Originally the White House had stood upon the bare hill-side, with its close grayish turf coming up close to the door in front, though there was a walled kitchen-garden on the east side. But when Mrs. Joscelyn came home a bride, a little flower-garden had been laid out in front of the door, which gave something of the air of a suburban villa to the austere hill-side house. Never was there a more forlorn little garden. Nothing would grow, and for many years its proprietors had ceased to solicit anything to grow. The grass-plots had grown gray again like the natural turf.