CHAPTER VII.
It was about eleven, when most of her household chores were done, that Betty started off to pay an informal call on Miss Pendarth, in some ways the most outstanding personality in the village of Beechfield.
"Busybody"-- "mischief-maker"-- "a very kind lady"-- "a disagreeable woman"-- "a fearful snob"-- "a true Christian"-- were some of the epithets which had been, and were still, used, to describe the woman to whose house, Rose Cottage, Betty Tosswill, with a slight feeling of discomfort bordering on pain, began wending her way.
Olivia Pendarth and her colourless younger sister, Anne, the latter now long dead, had settled down at Beechfield in the nineties of the last century.

When both over thirty years of age, they had selected Beechfield as a dwelling-place because of its quiet charm and nearness to London.

Also because Rose Cottage, which, in spite of its unassuming name, was, if a small yet a substantial, red-brick house with a good garden, paddock and stables, exactly suited them, as to price, and as to the accommodation they then wanted.

The surviving sister was now rather over sixty, and her income was very much smaller than it had been, but it never even occurred to her to try and sell what had become to her a place of mingled painful and happy memories.
In every civilised country a village is the world in little, though it is always surprising to the student of human nature to find how many distinct types are gathered within its narrow bounds.

And if this is true of village communities all over Europe, it is peculiarly true of an English village.
Miss Pendarth was a clever woman.