always kept locked, and the key of it lay in one of grannie's
drawers; but he had then discovered a back entrance less securely
fastened, and with a strange mingling of fear and curiosity had from
time to time extended his rambles over what seemed to him the huge
desolation of the place. Half of it was well built of stone and
lime, but of the other half the upper part was built of wood, which
now showed signs of considerable decay. One room opened into
another through the length of the place, revealing a vista of
machines, standing with an air of the last folding of the wings of
silence over them, and the sense of a deeper and deeper sinking into
the soundless abyss. But their activity was not so far vanished but
that by degrees Robert came to fancy that he had some time or other
seen a woman seated at each of those silent powers, whose single
hand set the whole frame in motion, with its numberless spindles and
spools rapidly revolving--a vague mystery of endless threads in
orderly complication, out of which came some desired, to him
unknown, result, so that the whole place was full of a bewildering
tumult of work, every little reel contributing its share, as the
water-drops clashing together make the roar of a tempest. Now all
was still as the church on a week-day, still as the school on a
Saturday afternoon. Nay, the silence seemed to have settled down
like the dust, and grown old and thick, so dead and old that the
ghost of the ancient noise had arisen to haunt the place.

Thither would Robert carry his violin, and there would he woo her.

'I'm thinkin' I maun tak her wi' me the nicht, Sanders,' he said,
holding the fiddle lovingly to his bosom, after he had finished his
next lesson.