The working day was not yet over, and the well-known chinking and clinking of the stonemason's implements smote her ear. She thought, when she began to count them, that there were a great many more men than there used to be, and she wondered why this was.
The young man who was sent out by the architects to supervise the builders, and whose acquaintance she had made with Mr. Kingston, was walking about the dusty enclosure, and presently recognising her, he lifted his hat, and then seeing that she still lingered, came up to the gate to speak to her.
"How are you getting on, Mr. Moore?" she asked pleasantly. "Are you still doing the foundations?"
Mr. Moore assured her that they had completed the foundations, and that they were getting on splendidly.
"Won't you come out and have a look at what has been done?" he inquired.
She thanked him and said she would; and he opened the gate with alacrity, and escorted her through a labyrinth of bricks and stones, over ground strewn thickly with sharp-edged chips that cut holes in her boots, very well pleased to be the first to show her the progress that had been made in her absence.
She could see for herself that a great deal had been done. The trenches were filled up; great square blocks of stone ridged the outlines of the ground-floor rooms—little bits of rooms they looked, and not at all like the stately and spacious apartments of the architect's design; but it seemed to her that what had been done could not be a tenth or twentieth part of all that there was to do.
"I suppose," she said, "it takes a long time to build the walls and make such a quantity of windows?"
"Oh, dear, no," responded Mr. Moore cheerfully. "All the worst of the work is over now, as far as the shell is concerned; the walls will run up in no time. It is a big house, but there are plenty of men on it, and all materials ready. It is after the shell is done that the real tedious work commences."
"You mean after the roof is on?"