Across this common one might see the lights of the town; dim outlines of factories and churches, and masses of buildings--the tortuous lines of light creeping up steep streets and lanes, and the indistinct outlines of the long range of the Blackrigg moors. On the left side of the road stood one solitary house, in a moderately sized garden--the Stonegate where Adrienne lived with her uncle. It was an old house of dark grey stone; square, solidly built, and of moderately large proportions. It was contemporary with the Oakenrod, and had been built by some far-back, dead and gone Mallory (they were lords of the manor of Thanshope) as a dower-house. In the garden the trees were shrivelled up, the flower-beds were adorned with nothing but a few evergreen bushes, and the grass was not kept as was the grass in the Oakenrod garden. Behind the house was the lonely-looking waste of heath or common which was out of Sebastian Mallory’s jurisdiction; and in front a low wall, with a wicket-gate in it, bounded the garden. From the wicket to the door was a flagged walk, raised a little above the grass border on either side of it. On each side the door two windows; on the second story five windows. The shutters of the lower windows were closed--the whole face of the house presented a blank, staring void, till at last Myles, looking intently upwards, saw a light appear in one of the upper windows, and a shadow pass the blind. That must be Adrienne’s room. Then he glanced at the surroundings of the house. ‘A lonely place enough!’ he decided within himself. ‘I’m glad I came home with her. If that blackguard had been at the trouble to follow her! I hope he doesn’t know where she lives: it hardly looks as if he did, or he wouldn’t have chosen the public library to molest her in. I don’t believe that if she called out, in this street, any one would hear her; and if they did, they’re a poor lot--tailors, and women, and ‘pothecaries: they wouldn’t know a woman’s screaming from a cat’s miauling.’ ‘It is a nasty place!’ he muttered again to himself, lingering unaccountably, reluctant to go. ‘It looks as if there were a blight, or a curse, or something upon it.’ At last he tore himself away, and took his homeward way. CHAPTER V. PHILOSOPHY AND FASCINATION. ‘A tenderness shows through her face, And, like the morning’s glow, Hints a full day below.’ Myles walked home, not in the ‘kind of dream’ proper for a hero under the circumstances, but thinking very lucidly and very connectedly during his pretty long walk, from the end of Blake Street to his house on the Townfield, chiefly of what had happened that evening. He thought of Adrienne--of all those summer months of silence, and then of the sudden, quick acquaintance.