The Rushtons lived in a big old red brick house close to the town hall in what was still called the market-place of Farafield, though all the meaner hubbub of the market had long ago been banished to the square behind, with its appropriate buildings. It was a house of the time of Queen Anne, with rows of glittering windows surmounted by a pediment, and though it was in the center of the town a fine old walled garden behind. To Lucy this garden seemed the brightest place imaginable when she was led into it through the shady passages of the old house, the thick walls and rambling arrangement of which defended it from the blazing of the August skies, which penetrated with pitiless heat and glare the naked walls of the Terrace, built without any consideration of atmospheric changes. Mrs. Rushton’s drawing-room was green and cool--all the venetian blinds carefully closed on one side, and on the other looking out upon the trees and shady lawn where two or three young people, girls in light dresses and young men scarcely less summer-like in costume, were playing croquet. These were the days when croquet still reigned on all lawns and country places, and nobody had as yet discovered that it was “slow.” The party was of the usual orthodox kind. There was a young, a very young curate in a long black coat and a wide-awake, and a second young man in light clothes with his hands in his pockets, whom Lucy’s inexperienced eyes with difficulty distinguished from Raymond Rushton; and two or three girls, one of them the daughter of the house, Emma, a shy hoyden of sixteen. All these young people looked with great curiosity at Lucy as she followed Mrs. Rushton out of the house in her black frock, Jock clinging closely to her. Jock, though he had a great deal of self-possession on ordinary occasions, was shy in such an unusual emergency as this. He had never been at a garden party, he was not used to society, and he did not know how to play croquet, in all which points Lucy was almost as uninstructed as he. There was a tea-table set out under an old mulberry-tree, with garden-chairs and rugs spread out upon the grass. Nothing could be more pleasant, cool, leisurely, and comfortable. It was indeed a scene such as might be seen on a summer afternoon in almost every garden with a good-sized house attached to it, with a lawn and a mulberry-tree, throughout England. But then Lucy was not much acquainted with such places, and to her everything was new. They all stood and looked at her as she followed Mrs. Rushton across the grass--looked at her with inward sighs and wonderings. To think she should be so rich, while none of the others had anything to speak of. It did not perhaps go so far as actual envy; but it was certainly surprise, and a bewildered question why such good fortune should have fallen to an inconsiderable girl, and not at all to the others who might have been supposed able to make so much more use of it.