Nothing would trouble her conscience if she could succeed in keeping her daughter separated from John Caldigate.
Caldigate in his hot haste walked up to the iron gates and found them chained.

It was in vain that he shook them, and in vain that he looked at them.

The gates were fully twelve feet high, and spiked at the top.
At each side of the gates ran a wall surmounted by iron railings,--extending to the gardener's cottage on the one side, and to the coach-house on the other.

The drive up to the house, which swept round a plot of thick shrubs, lay between the various offices,--the stables and coach-house being on one side, and the laundry and gardener's cottage on the other.

From the road there was no mode of ingress for him to this enclosure, unless he could get over the railings.