CHAPTER I.
The evening before Helen Jeffrey's wedding day, the whole household at the rectory came out into the garden.
"The fact is," said Dr.Howe, smiling good-naturedly at his niece, "the importance of this occasion has made everybody so full of suppressed excitement one can't breathe in the house." And indeed a wedding in Ashurst had all the charm of novelty.

"Why, bless my soul," said the rector, "let me see: it must be ten--no, twelve years since Mary Drayton was married, and that was our last wedding.

Well, we couldn't stand such dissipation oftener; it would wake us up." But Ashurst rather prided itself upon being half asleep.

The rush and life of newer places had a certain vulgarity; haste was undignified, it was almost ill bred, and the most striking thing about the village, resting at the feet of its low green hills, was its atmosphere of leisure and repose.
Its grassy road was nearly two miles long, so that Ashurst seemed to cover a great deal of ground, though there were really very few houses.
A lane, leading to the rectory, curled about the foot of East Hill at one end of the road, and at the other was the brick-walled garden of the Misses Woodhouse.
Between these extremes the village had slowly grown; but its first youth was so far past, no one quite remembered it, and even the trying stage of middle age was over, and its days of growth were ended.

This was perhaps because of its distance from the county town, for Mercer was twelve miles away, and there was no prospect of a railroad to unite them.