his rough
face, gnarled and blotched, and hirsute with the stubble of neglected
beard--his whole ursine face transfigured by the passage of the sweet
sounds through his chaotic brain, which they swept like the wind of God,
when of old it moved on the face of the waters that clothed the void and
formless world.

'Haud yer tongue!' he would say in a hoarse whisper, when Robert sought
to attract his attention; 'haud yer tongue, man, and hearken. Gin yon
bonny leddy 'at yer grannie keeps lockit up i' the aumry war to tak to
the piano, that's jist hoo she wad play. Lord, man! pit yer sowl i' yer
lugs, an' hearken.'

The soutar was all wrong in this; for if old Mr. Falconer's violin had
taken woman-shape, it would have been that of a slight, worn, swarthy
creature, with wild black eyes, great and restless, a voice like a
bird's, and thin fingers that clawed the music out of the wires like the
quills of the old harpsichord; not that of Mary St. John, who was tall,
and could not help being stately, was large and well-fashioned, as full
of repose as Handel's music, with a contralto voice to make you weep,
and eyes that would have seemed but for their maidenliness to be always
ready to fold you in their lucid gray depths.

Robert stared at the soutar, doubting at first whether he had not
been drinking. But the intoxication of music produces such a different
expression from that of drink, that Robert saw at once that if he had
indeed been drinking, at least the music had got above the drink. As
long as the playing went on, Elshender was not to be moved from the
window.

But to many of the people of Rothieden the music did not recommend
the musician; for every sort of music, except the most unmusical
of psalm-singing, was in their minds of a piece with 'dancin' an'
play-actin', an' ither warldly vainities an' abominations.' And Robert,
being as yet more capable of melody than harmony, grudged to lose a
lesson on Sandy's 'auld wife o' a fiddle' for any amount of Miss St.
John's playing.

CHAPTER XV. ERIC ERICSON.

One gusty evening--it was of the last day in March--Robert well
remembered both the date and the day--a bleak wind was driving up the
long street of the town, and Robert was standing looking out of one of
the windows in the gable-room. The evening was closing into night. He
hardly knew how he came to be there, but when he thought about it he
found it was play-Wednesday, and that he had been all the half-holid