He stayed for half an hour--outstaying Ned, who retired modestly at the end of twenty minutes; then he led Rachel into the hall, kissed her, told her to go to bed early and come out with him for a ride in the morning, and went off to his club--sorry to leave his little lady-love, but glad to be able to get his letters, to hear what was going on in Melbourne, and to read his "Argus" on the day of publication again. After his departure Mrs. Hardy and Beatrice plunged fathoms deep in talk. Mrs. Hardy wanted to know how her husband and her servants, and her neighbours and her friends, had been conducting themselves during her absence, and Beatrice wanted minute particulars about Lucilla and the baby. Rachel had no occasion to feel herself _de trop_; at the same time she saw she was not wanted. She sauntered softly round the room, laid some music scattered about over the piano in a neat pile, re-arranged some yellow pansies that were tumbling out of a green Vallauris bowl, and then stole noiselessly into the hall and out of the house. The grounds of the Hardy domain were more beautiful with flowers now than she had ever seen them; but she did not stay amongst the flowers. She went down little lonely paths, intersecting vegetable beds and forcing-frames, to a gate at the bottom of the kitchen-garden, where she was within speaking distance of the workmen engaged on the new house, with nothing to impede a full view of their operations. She was feverishly anxious to know how they were going on--whether they were still "pottering at the foundations," or whether the stage of walls had set in. 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.