m
having little projecting dormer-windows), a couple of public-houses, and
a small grocery establishment.

This constituted the village proper; but a little aloof from it--being
in it but not of it, as it were--there were in all perhaps half a dozen
residences of a somewhat more pretentious kind. There was the rectory,
for instance, on the opposite side of the road, eastward of the church,
built in the very centre of its extensive garden, and snugly surrounded
on all sides by high stone walls. Then there was Stoke House, near the
rectory, standing well back from the road, embowered in trees, and with
a carriage-drive running straight up through its beautiful rose-garden
to the front door. Nearer the beach, and on the opposite side of the
valley, was "Verbena Cottage," the abode of Lieutenant Bobus, in command
of the coast-guard; and still nearer the beach, some ten or a dozen
yards back from the road, enclosed within a neat paling, sheltered by
lofty trees, with a lovely flower-garden in front and an extensive fruit
and kitchen-garden in the rear, stood "Sea View," a small but well-built
house, in which resided the relict and daughter of the late "Cap'n"
Walford.

The late "Cap'n" Walford had been a wonderfully popular man in his day;
and his memory was greatly esteemed and revered by the villagers.
Manifesting, at an early age, a love of enterprise and excitement quite
extraordinary even in an Alverstoke man, he had seized the first
opportunity which offered to become the owner of a very fine
fast-sailing lugger, in which, during his thirty years of devotion to
maritime pursuits, he, by a rare combination of prudence and audacity,
gradually acquired the reputation of being a most successful smuggler--
and the snug little fortune of some ten thousand pounds. The latter and
more desirable portion of his acquirements he carefully invested, as it
dribbled in bit by bit, in house-property in the neighbourhood; so that,
when this estimable man's career was cut short at the comparatively
early age of sixty years, by an unlucky cannon-shot fired from a revenue
cutter, his disconsolate relict found herself the possessor of a
comfortable income amounting to some five hundred pounds per annum,
together with "Sea View" and--last, but by no means least--a daughter,
fourteen years of age. This melancholy event occurred four years before
the date at which this history opens; Lucy Walford was therefore about
eighteen years old