PATHS OF JUDGEMENT

By
ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK
(Author of “The Rescue” “The Confounding of Camelia” etc)



LONDON
ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE & CO Ltd
1904

Butler & Tanner,
The Selwood Printing Works.
Frome, and London.

PART I
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII.
PART II
CHAPTER: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV

PART I

CHAPTER I

MRS. CUTHBERT MERRICK, erect in her shining dogcart, watched the stout pony’s indolent advance with severity, but with forbearance. The road was steep and the day hot.

Far below, the ascent began among beech-woods that climbed from gentle valleys; than came the pine-trees, casting blue-black shadows across the dusty road, and when the hill-top was reached the lighter shade of lime and birch and beech again dappled the sunny whiteness.

Mrs. Merrick allowed the pony to pause here, and glanced round at the wide distances below with something more of distaste for the supremacy of her outlook than admiration for its beauty. The view from the hill-top was a grievance to her. They had only bucolic meadows, and trees of an orderly dulness, that didn’t even make Constable effects, to look at, below there, about Trensome Hall. But she turned her eyes resolutely from the unpleasing comparison, applied her whip smartly, and a minute’s quick trot brought her to her destination.

Along the road ran the low stone wall of a flower-filled garden; beyond the flowers a small stone house, its windows shining, faced the south-western spaces, and behind the house a sudden rise of pleasant summer woods saved it from bleakness in its lonely eminence. Indeed the house, though alone, was not lonely. It had an effect of standing with contented serenity in its long outlook over the pine-woods, the beech-woods, the rippled wave of low hill and valley, lapping one upon the other to the splendid line of the horizon.

So high, so alone, yet so set in beauty, so independent, with the half-clasp of its limes and beeches, the jewelled splash of flowers about it. The independence and serenity were almost defiant, Mrs. Merrick thought, as she looked with a familiar disapproval at the house, too large for a cottage, too classic, with its pillared door-way and balanced proportions, for its diminutiveness. It made one think of a tiny Greek temple incongruously placed, and to Mrs. Merrick it symbolized an attitude that had always bewildered and irritated her. The garden, too, irritated her and made her envious.