something
else that damped my spirits more than any rains, however fierce and
heavy, could damp my skin--the sense of my own utter helplessness. There
I was--having acted on impulse--at the foot of a mass of grey stone which
had once been impregnable, and was still formidable! I neither knew how
to get in, nor how to look in, if that had been possible; and I now saw
that in coming at all I ought to have come accompanied by a squad of
police with authority to search the whole place, from end to end and top
to bottom. And I reflected, with a grim sense of the irony of it, that to
do that would have been a fine long job for a dozen men--what, then, was
it that I had undertaken single-handed?

It was at this moment, as I clung against the wall, sheltering myself as
well as I could from the pouring rain, that I heard through its steady
beating an equally steady throb as of some sort of machine. It was a very
subdued, scarcely apparent sound, but it was there--it was unmistakable.
And suddenly--though in those days we were only just becoming familiar
with them--I knew what it was--the engine of some sort of automobile; but
not in action; the sound came from the boilers or condensers, or whatever
the things were called which they used in the steam-driven cars. And it
was near by--near at my right hand, farther along the line of the wall
beneath which I was cowering. There was something to set all my curiosity
aflame!--what should an automobile be doing there, at that hour--for it
was now nearing well on to midnight--and in such close proximity to a
half-ruinous place like that? And now, caring no more for the rain than
if it had been a springtide shower, I slowly began to creep along the
wall in the direction of the sound.

And here you will understand the situation of things better, if I say
that the habitable part of Hathercleugh was a long way from the old part
to which I had come. The entire mass of building, old and new, was of
vast extent, and the old was separated from the new by a broken and
utterly ruinous wing, long since covered over with ivy. As for the old
itself, there was a great square tower at one corner of it, with walls
extending from its two angles; it was along one of these walls that I was
now creeping. And presently--the sound of the gentle throbbing growing
slightly louder as I made my way along--I came to the tower, and to the
deep-set gateway in it, and I knew at once that in that gateway there was