And then, by mere mechanical submission to the force of habit, she found herself presently at that back gate which overlooked "the house," leaning her arms upon the upper rail, and staring at the low ridges of gleaming wall a few dozen yards off, which were rising as it seemed to her, with the rapidity of magic from the foundations that had taken so long to do, the stony embodiment of a relentless fate.
It was very quiet there to-night. No swarms of carpenters, and bricklayers, and stonemasons; no idle boys gaping at them over the fence; no people walking and driving about the road.
She tried the gate, and found it locked; then she climbed lightly over it, and holding up her skirts, stole across the strip of arid waste that lay between it and the nucleus of the building which was once to have been her palace, and now could only be her prison-house, eager to discover anything she could that would indicate the real progress that was being made.
She threaded her course daintily through heaps of brick and stone and broken débris; she entered the skeleton house by its gaping porch, and she wandered about the labyrinth of its passages and vestibules, feeling her way with cautious feet and outstretched hands, until she came to her own boudoir; and there she sat down on a joist of the flooring, and laid her face on her knees and cried.
The sweetness of the solitary night, quite as much as the sight of all those permanently-adjusted ground-floor door and window frames, melted her into these sudden tears, full as she was of the aching rapture of her love and trouble, which needed but a touch to overflow. The possibility of a human spectator of her emotion never for a moment occurred to her.
However, Mr. Roden Dalrymple had also taken it into his head to have an after-dinner walk in the moonlight, and happening for a very good reason, to be prowling about in this neighbourhood, he had seen the slender little figure gliding across the open space between the back gate and the new building, and he had guessed in a moment whose it was.
And so, as Rachel sat with her feet in subterranean darkness, her hands clasping her knees just above the level of the floor that was to be, and her face hidden in her lap, she heard a sound, suggestive of midnight robbers and murderers, that for a moment paralysed her timid heart; and then a voice, calling her softly,
"Miss Fetherstonhaugh! Do not be frightened. It is only I—Roden Dalrymple."
He came in through the gap of the doorway, while she stared at him and held her breath; he stepped swiftly and lightly from joist to joist until he reached the corner where she was sitting.
Then he sat down beside her quietly, as if he were taking a place she had been keeping for him; and the next moment—with no question asked and no explanation given—they were sealing the most sacred of all contracts irrevocably, in the silence of the solemn night.