The brick front was just in a line with the street, or rather the road.

Behind the door hung a cloak with a small collar, a bridle, and a black

leather cap, and on the floor, in a corner, were a pair of leggings,

still covered with dry mud. On the right was the one apartment, that was

both dining and sitting room. A canary yellow paper, relieved at the

top by a garland of pale flowers, was puckered everywhere over the badly

stretched canvas; white calico curtains with a red border hung crossways

at the length of the window; and on the narrow mantelpiece a clock with

a head of Hippocrates shone resplendent between two plate candlesticks

under oval shades. On the other side of the passage was Charles's

consulting room, a little room about six paces wide, with a table,

three chairs, and an office chair. Volumes of the "Dictionary of Medical

Science," uncut, but the binding rather the worse for the successive

sales through which they had gone, occupied almost along the six shelves

of a deal bookcase.

The smell of melted butter penetrated through the walls when he saw

patients, just as in the kitchen one could hear the people coughing in

the consulting room and recounting their histories.

Then, opening on the yard, where the stable was, came a large

dilapidated room with a stove, now used as a wood-house, cellar, and

pantry, full of old rubbish, of empty casks, agricultural implements

past service, and a mass of dusty things whose use it was impossible to

guess.

The garden, longer than wide, ran between two mud walls with espaliered

apricots, to a hawthorn hedge that separated it from the field. In the

middle was a slate sundial on a brick pedestal; four flower beds with

eglantines surrounded symmetrically the more useful kitchen garden bed.

Right at the bottom, under the spruce bushes, was a cure in plaster

reading his breviary.

Emma went upstairs. The first room was not furnished, but in the second,

which was their bedroom, was a mahogany bedstead in an alcove with red

drapery. A shell box adorned the chest of drawers, and on the secretary

near the window a bouquet of orange blossoms tied with white satin

ribbons stood in a bottle. It was a bride's bouquet; it was the other

one's. She looked at it. Charles noticed it; he took it and carried it

up to the attic, while Emma seated in an arm-chair (they were putting

her things down around her) thought of her bridal flowers packed up in

a bandbox, and wondered, dreaming, what would be done with them if she

were to die.




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