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Who Was Jane?; A Story for Young People of All Ages
Who Was Jane A Story for Young People of All Ages Author:Evelyn Sharp General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1922 Original Publisher: Macmillan Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER III JANE COMES TO GREENLANDS Greenlands, the Chalfonts house, was built on the lower slope of the round chalk hill that looked down on the village of Little Mande- ville. The villagers, when they had to climb the hill in quest of him, sometimes grumbled at the 'mad doctor,' as he was called, for living up there instead of at the old surgery in the village street. Yet, while they grumbled, they never wished to see his predecessor back again. No one would have called old Dr. Harben mad ; but neither had he 'a way with him,' as the mad doctor had, that cured you sooner than any medicine; and he did not allow accounts to run on indefinitely, as Dr. Chalfont did, when a patient was out of work or down on his luck. So when he built the new house on the down, with its beautiful view of five counties and a garden that had to be dug out of the hillside, the neighbourhood merely thought him a little madder than before, and forgave him, for his wife's sake as well as his own. And, after all, if Greenlands was uphill to the folk of LittleMandeville, it was downhill to the inhabitants of the farms and hamlets that lay scattered over the downs beyond. For Dr. Chalfont's practice extended, not only across the valley to the old market town of Herndale, but also along the hard road that climbed the hill and wound over the top and down the opposite slope of it on the way to London. It was up this hard road from the village that Helen laboriously pushed her bicycle for the third time, on the afternoon of the day that Denys was to bring Jane to Greenlands. Three times she had sped...« less