For the next eight years the home of Morgan and Louisa Thomas and their children was to be Gate House in the south-western corner of the parish of Mayfield in East Sussex. The Georgian mansion of the same name that Louisa had inherited from her father had been demolished after her marriage, and had been replaced with a modern house half a mile away, on the site of a farm called Merriams, which belonged to the estate. The name Gate House was transferred to the new building, though the local people continued to refer to the place as Merriams.

Whilst the old Gate House had stood close to the turnpike road leading from Mayfield to Heathfield, its replacement, ‘a stone cottage or shooting box’, lay ‘low, and hidden from the road’. It was, Georgina thought when she first saw it, ‘a horrid little place’. No doubt it suited Morgan's increasingly unsociable disposition, but for his wife and children it brought loneliness and isolation. Sale particulars of 1862 describe Gate House as ‘a commodious residence in the Elizabethan style of architecture … surrounded by park-like paddocks and ornamental woods’, with twenty-three bedrooms in addition to large drawing and dining rooms, a library, a billiard room, and the usual domestic offices, stables and outbuildings. Drawings and photographs show a somewhat curious jumble of buildings resembling two or three houses joined together, and it is possible that the new Gate House incorporated at least part of the old Merriams farmhouse. The house was added to, in a somewhat haphazard manner, during the 1850s.

Three weeks after their arrival in Sussex, Georgina and her mother escaped from their rural confinement and went up to London for a few days. The ostensible reason for their visit was the need to engage a governess for Emily and Florence, but they also found time to enjoy themselves. They drove in Hyde Park and visited the Botanical Gardens. Dressed in her ‘silk écossais, white bonnet and new mantille’, Georgina found that she attracted a certain amount of attention, though this was not entirely welcome, for the English men looked ‘such fools’ and stared at her in ‘such a disagreeable, impudent way’. They were, however, ‘very tall’.