"
"He was to come from Fochabers tonight. Stoat took the bay mare to
meet him yesterday."
"He wad never start in sic a win'! It's fit to blaw the saiddle
aff o' the mear's back."
"He may have started before it came on to blow like this," said
Lady Florimel.
Malcolm liked the suggestion the less because of its probability,
believing, in that case, he should have arrived long ago. But he
took care not to increase Florimel's alarm.
By this time Malcolm knew the whole of the accessible inside of the
roof well--better far than any one else about the house. From one
part to another, over the whole of it, he now led Lady Florimel.
In the big shadowed glimmer of his one candle, all parts of the
garret seemed to him frowning with knitted brows over resentful
memories--as if the phantom forms of all the past joys and self
renewing sorrows, all the sins and wrongs, all the disappointments
and failures of the house, had floated up, generation after
generation, into that abode of helpless brooding, and there hung
hovering above the fast fleeting life below, which now, in its turn,
was ever sending up like fumes from heart and brain, to crowd the
dim, dreary, larva haunted, dream wallowing chaos of half obliterated
thought and feeling. To Florimel it looked a dread waste, a
region deserted and forgotten, mysterious with far reaching nooks
of darkness, and now awful with the wind raving and howling over
slates and leads so close to them on all sides,--as if a flying
army of demons were tearing at the roof to get in and find covert
from pursuit.
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