that was visible. There was a
cornfield below the larch-plantation; and though the corn was all laid
flat by the wet and the wind, a cow and her calf that had strayed into
the field seemed to have no difficulty in finding a rich, moist
breakfast. Then a small girl appeared, vainly trying with one hand to
keep her kerchief on her head, while with the other she threw stones at
the marauders. By and by even these disappeared; and there was nothing
visible outside but that hurrying and desolate sea, and the wet,
bedraggled, comfortless shore. She turned away with a shudder.

All that day Keith Macleod was in despair. As for himself, he would have
had sufficient joy in the mere consciousness of the presence of this
beautiful creature. His eyes followed her with a constant delight;
whether she took up a book, or examined the cunning spring of a
sixteenth-century dagger, or turned to the dripping panes. He would have
been content even to sit and listen to Mr. White sententiously lecturing
Lady Macleod about the Renaissance, knowing that from time to time those
beautiful, tender eyes would meet his. But what would she think of it?
Would she consider this the normal condition of life in the
Highlands--this being boxed up in an old-fashioned room, with doors and
windows firmly closed against the wind and the wet, with a number of
people trying to keep up some sort of social intercourse, and not very
well succeeding? She had looked at the portraits in the
dining-hall--looming darkly from their black backgrounds, though two or
three were in resplendent uniforms; she had examined all the trophies of
the chase--skins, horns, and what not--in the outer corridor; she had
opened the piano, and almost started back from the discords produced by
the feebly jangling old keys.

"You do not cultivate music much," she had said to Janet Macleod, with a
smile.

"No," answered Janet, seriously. "We have little use for music
here--except to sing to a child now and again, and you know you do not
want a piano for that."

And then the return to the cold window, with the constant rain and the
beating of the white surge on the black rocks. The imprisonment became
torture--became maddening. What if he were suddenly to murder this old
man and stop forever his insufferable prosing about Bernada Siena and
Andrea Mantegna? It seemed so strange to hear him talk of the unearthly
calm of Raphael's "St. Michael"--of the beautiful, still landscape of
it, a