sides
thee!"

By the time she reached the top she was radiantly joyous in the
prospect of a quiet hour with him whose presence and words always gave
her strength, who made the world look less mournful, and the will of
God altogether beautiful; who taught her that the glory of the Father's
love lay in the inexorability of its demands, that it is of his deep
mercy that no one can get out until he has paid the uttermost farthing.

They stepped upon the roof and into the gorgeous afterglow of an autumn
sunset. The whole country, like another sea, was flowing from that that
well of colour, in tidal waves of an ever advancing creation. Its more
etherial part, rushing on above, broke on the old roofs and chimneys
and splashed its many tinted foam all over them; while through it and
folded in it came a cold thin wind that told of coming death. Arctura
breathed a deep breath, and her joy grew. It is wonderful how small a
physical elevation, lifting us into a slightly thinner air, serves to
raise the human spirits! We are like barometers, only work the other
way; the higher we go, the higher goes our mercury.

They stood for a moment in deep enjoyment, then simultaneously turned
to each other.

"My lady," said Donal, "with such a sky as that out there, it hardly
seems as if there could be such a thing as our search to-night! Hollow
places, hidden away for evil cause, do not go with it at all! There is
the story of gracious invention and glorious gift; here the story of
greedy gathering and self-seeking, which all concealment involves!"

"But there may be nothing, you know, Mr. Grant!" said Arctura, troubled
for the house.

"There may be nothing. But if there is such a room, you may be sure it
has some relation with terrible wrong--what, we may never find out, or
even the traces of it."

"I shall not be afraid," she said, as if speaking with herself. "It is
the terrible dreaming that makes me weak. In the morning I tremble as
if I had been in the hands of some evil power."

Donal turned his eyes upon her. How thin she looked in the last of the
sunlight! A pang went through him at the thought that one day he might
be alone with Davie in the huge castle, untended by the consciousness
that a living light and loveliness flitted somewhere about its gloomy
and ungenial walls. But he would not think the thought! How that dismal
Miss Carmichael must have worried her! When the very hope of the
creature in his creator is attacked