Here was the avalanche
whose fall had so terrified the household! The formless mass had
yesterday been a fair proportioned and ornate stack of chimneys.
He scrambled to the top of the heap and sitting down on a stone
carved with a plaited Celtic band, yet again fell athinking. The
marquis must dismiss him in the morning; would it not be better to
go away now, and spare poor old Duncan a terrible fit of rage? He
would suppose he had fled from the pseudo maternal net of Mrs Stewart;
and not till he had found a place to which he could welcome him
would he tell him the truth. But his nature recoiled both from the
unmanliness of such a flight, and from the appearance of conscious
wrong it must involve, and he dismissed the notion. Scheme after
scheme for the future passed through his head, and still he sat
on the heap in the light of the high gliding moon, like a ghost on
the ruins of his earthly home, and his eyes went listlessly straying
like servants without a master. Suddenly he found them occupied
with a low iron studded door in the wall of the house, which he
had never seen before. He descended, and found it hardly closed,
for there was no notch to receive the heavy latch. Pushing. it open
on great rusty hinges, he saw within what in the shadow appeared
a precipitous descent His curiosity was roused; he stole back
to his room and fetched his candle; and having, by the aid of his
tinderbox, lighted it in the shelter of the heap, peeped again
through the doorway, and saw what seemed a narrow cylindrical pit,
only, far from showing a great yawning depth, it was filled with
stones and rubbish nearly to the bottom of the door.
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