w was
out of his heart; the glow was out of the world. The bleak, kindless
wind was hissing through those pines that clothed the hill above
Bodyfauld, and over the dead garden, where in the summer time the rose
had looked down so lovingly on the heartsease. If he had stood once more
at gloaming in that barley-stubble, not even the wail of Flodden-field
would have found him there, but a keen sense of personal misery and
hopeless cold. Was the summer a lie?

Not so. The winter restrains, that the summer may have the needful time
to do its work well; for the winter is but the sleep of summer.

Now in the winter of his discontent, and in Nature finding no help,
Robert was driven inwards--into his garret, into his soul. There, the
door of his paradise being walled up, he began, vaguely, blindly, to
knock against other doors--sometimes against stone-walls and rocks,
taking them for doors--as travel-worn, and hence brain-sick men have
done in a desert of mountains. A door, out or in, he must find, or
perish.

It fell, too, that Miss St. John went to visit some friends who lived
in a coast town twenty miles off; and a season of heavy snow followed
by frost setting in, she was absent for six weeks, during which time,
without a single care to trouble him from without, Robert was in the
very desert of desolation. His spirits sank fearfully. He would pass his
old music-master in the street with scarce a recognition, as if the bond
of their relation had been utterly broken, had vanished in the smoke of
the martyred violin, and all their affection had gone into the dust-heap
of the past.

Dooble Sanny's character did not improve. He took more and more whisky,
his bouts of drinking alternating as before with fits of hopeless
repentance. His work was more neglected than ever, and his wife having
no money to spend even upon necessaries, applied in desperation to her
husband's bottle for comfort. This comfort, to do him justice, he never
grudged her; and sometimes before midday they would both be drunk--a
condition expedited by the lack of food. When they began to recover,
they would quarrel fiercely; and at last they became a nuisance to the
whole street. Little did the whisky-hating old lady know to what god she
had really offered up that violin--if the consequences of the holocaust
can be admitted as indicating the power which had accepted it.

But now began to appear in Robert the first signs of a practical outcome
of such trut