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.