They found Miss Kirkbright and Sylvie waiting for them at the red house.  It was a quaint structure, with a kind of old, foreign look about it.  It made you think either of an ancient family mansion in some provincial French town, or of a convent for nuns.

It was of dark red brick,—­the quality of which Mr. Kirkbright remarked with satisfaction,—­with high walls at the gable ends carried above the slope of the roof.  These were met and overclasped at the corners by wide, massive eaves.  A high, narrow door with a fan-light occupied the middle of the end before which the party stood.  Windows above, with little balconies, were hung with old red woolen damask, fading out in stripes; perishing, doubtless, with moth and decay; in one was suspended a rusty bird-cage which had once been gilt.

What an honest neighborhood this was, in which these things had remained for years, and not even the panes of the windows had been broken by little boys!  But then the villages full of little boys were miles away, and the single families at the nearer farms were well ordered Puritan folk, fathered and mothered in careful, old fashioned sort.  There was some indefinite awe, also, of the lonely place, and of the rich, far-off owner who might come any day to look after his rights, and make a reckoning with them.

Up, from platform to platform of the terraced rock, as Sylvie had said, climbed the successive sections of the dwelling.  The front was two and a half stories high; the last outlying projection was a single square apartment with its own low roof; towards the back, within, you went up flight after flight of short stairs from room to room, from passage to passage.  Once or twice, the few broad steps between two apartments ran the whole width of the same.

“What a place for plays!”

“Or for a little children’s school, ranged in rows, one above another.”

“The man who built it must have dreamt it first!”

These were the exclamations that they made to each other as they passed through, exploring.

There was a great number of bedrooms, divided off here and there; the upper front was one row of them with a gallery running across the house, in whose windows toward the south hung the old red woolen draperies and the bird-cage.

Below, at the back, the last room opened by a door upon a high, flat table of the rock, around whose overhanging edge a light railing had been run.  Standing here, they looked up and down the beautiful gorge, into the heart of the hill and the depth of its secret shaded places on the one hand, and on the other into the rush and whirl of the rapidly descending and broken torrent to where it flung itself off the sudden brink, and changed into white mist and an everlasting song.

“This last room ought to be a chapel,” said Mr. Kirkbright.  “Out here could be open-air service in the beautiful weather, to the sound of that continual organ.”