Stephen Whitelaw's house was within an easy walk of the Grange; but the gig was a more dignified mode of approach than a walk, and the bailiff insisted on driving his daughter to her suitor's abode in that conveyance.
Wyncomb was a long low gray stone house, of an unknown age; a spacious habitation enough, with many rooms, and no less than three staircases, but possessing no traces of that fallen grandeur which pervaded the Grange.

It had been nothing better than a farm-house from time immemorial, and had been added to and extended and altered to suit the convenience of successive generations of farmers.

It was a gloomy-looking house at all times, Ellen Carley thought, but especially gloomy under that leaden winter sky; a house which it would have been almost impossible to associate with pleasant family gatherings or the joyous voices of young children; a grim desolate-looking house, that seemed to freeze the passing traveller with its cold blank stare, as if its gloomy portal had a voice to say to him, "However lost you may be for lack of shelter, however weary for want of rest, come not here!" Idle fancies, perhaps; but they were the thoughts with which Wyncomb Farmhouse always inspired Ellen Carley.
"The place just suits its master's hard miserly nature," she said.

"One would think it had been made on purpose for him; or perhaps the Whitelaws have been like that from generation to generation." There was no such useless adornment as a flower-garden at Wyncomb.
Stephen Whitelaw cared about as much for roses and lilies as he cared for Greek poetry or Beethoven's sonatas.

At the back of the house there was a great patch of bare shadowless ground devoted to cabbages and potatoes, with a straggling border of savoury herbs; a patch not even divided from the farm land beyond, but melting imperceptibly into a field of mangel-wurzel.