He had gathered a bunch of the finest, and had thrown himself down
on the side of the dune, whence, as he lay, only the high road, the
park wall, the temple of the winds, and the blue sky were visible.
The vast sea, for all the eye could tell, was nowhere--not a
ripple of it was to be seen, but the ear was filled with the night
gush and flow of it. A sweet wind was blowing, hardly blowing,
rather gliding, like a slumbering river, from the west. The sun
had vanished, leaving a ruin of gold and rose behind him, gradually
fading into dull orange and lead and blue sky and stars. There was
light enough to read by, but he never opened his book. He was thinking
over something Mr Graham had said to him a few days before, namely,
that all impatience of monotony, all weariness of best things even,
are but signs of the eternity of our nature--the broken human
fashions of the divine everlastingness.
"I dinna ken whaur it comes frae," said a voice above him.
He looked up. On the ridge of the mound, the whole of his dwarfed
form relieved against the sky and looking large in the twilight,
stood the mad laird, reaching out his forehead towards the west
with his arms expanded as if to meet the ever coming wind.
"Naebody kens whaur the win' comes frae, or whaur it gangs till,"
said Malcolm. "Ye're no a hair waur aff nor ither fowk, there,
laird."
"Does't come frae a guid place, or frae an ill?" said the laird,
doubtingly.
"It's saft an' kin'ly i' the fin' o' 't," returned Malcolm suggestively,
rising and joining the laird on the top of the dune, and like him
spreading himself out to the western air.
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