While Lady Graves was standing at the Bradmouth station on that Saturday in November, waiting for the London train, she saw a man whose face she knew and who saluted her with much humility. He was dressed in a semi-clerical fashion, in clothes made of smooth black cloth, and he wore a broad wide-awake, the only spot of colour about him being a neck scarf of brilliant red, whereof the strange incongruity caught and offended her eye. For a long time she puzzled herself with endeavours to recollect who this individual might be. He did not look like a farmer; and it was obvious that he could not belong to the neighbouring clergy, since no parson in his senses would wear such a tie. Finally Lady Graves concluded that he must be a dissenting minister, and dismissed the matter from her mind. At Liverpool Street, however, she saw him again, although he tried to avoid her, or so she thought; and then it flashed across her that this person was Mr. Samuel Rock of Moor Farm, and she wondered vaguely what his business in London could be. Had Lady Graves possessed the gift of clairvoyance she would have wondered still more, for Mr. Rock’s business was curiously connected with her own, seeing that he also had journeyed to town, for the first time in his life, in order to obtain an interview with Joan Haste, whose address he had purchased at so great a price on the previous day. As yet he had no very clear idea of what he should say or do when he found himself in Joan’s presence. He knew only that he was driven to seek that presence by a desire which he was absolutely unable to control. He loved Joan, not as other men love, but with all the strength and virulence of his distempered nature; and this love, or passion, or incipient insanity, drew him to her with as irresistible a force as a magnet draws the fragment of steel that is brought within its influence. Had he known her to be at the uttermost ends of the earth, it would have drawn him thither; and though he was timid and fearful of the vengeance of Heaven, there was no danger that he would not have braved, and no crime which he would not have committed, that he might win her to himself.