The fence upon the road was a high, solid stone wall, along whose top clustered a dense shrubbery, so that, although the land rose from the road toward the house, the lawn was entirely sequestered; and you might sit upon it and enjoy the pleasant rural prospect of fields, woods, and hills, without being seen from the road.

The house itself was a stately, formal mansion.

Its light color contrasted well with the lofty pine-trees around it.

But they, in turn, invested it with an air of secrecy and gloom, unrelieved by flowers or blossoming shrubs, of which there were no traces near the house, although in the rear there was a garden so formally regular that it looked like a penitentiary for flowers.
These were the pine-trees that Hope Wayne had heard sing all her life--but sing like the ocean, not like birds or human voices.

In the black autumn midnights they struggled with the north winds that smote them fiercely and filled the night with uproar, while the child cowering in her bed thought of wrecks on pitiless shores--of drowning mothers and hapless children.