"You call this lonely, do you!" said Donal thoughtfully. "--It is a grand place, anyhow!"
"You are right--as you see it now. But wait till winter! Then perhaps you will change your impression a little."
"Pardon me if I doubt whether you know what winter can be so well as I do. This east coast is by all accounts a bitter place, but I fancy it is only upon a great hill-side you can know the heart and soul of a snow-blast."
"I yield that," returned Mr. Graeme. "--It is bitter enough here though, and a mercy we can keep warm in-doors."
"Which is often more than we shepherd-folk can do," said Donal.
Mr. Graeme used to say afterwards he was never so immediately taken with a man. It was one of the charms of Donal's habit of being, that he never spoke as if he belonged to any other than the class in which he had been born and brought up. This came partly of pride in his father and mother, partly of inborn dignity, and partly of religion. To him the story of our Lord was the reality it is, and he rejoiced to know himself so nearly on the same social level of birth as the Master of his life and aspiration. It was Donal's one ambition--to give the high passion a low name--to be free with the freedom which was his natural inheritance, and which is to be gained only by obedience to the words of the Master. From the face of this aspiration fled every kind of pretence as from the light flies the darkness. Hence he was entirely and thoroughly a gentleman. What if his clothes were not even of the next to the newest cut! What if he had not been used to what is called society! He was far above such things. If he might but attain to the manners of the "high countries," manners which appear because they exist--because they are all through the man! He did not think what he might seem in the eyes of men. Courteous, helpful, considerate, always seeking first how far he could honestly agree with any speaker, opposing never save sweetly and apologetically--except indeed some utterance flagrantly unjust were in his ears--there was no man of true breeding, in or out of society, who would not have granted that Donal was fit company for any man or woman. Mr. Graeme's eye glanced down over the tall square-shouldered form, a little stooping from lack of drill and much meditation, but instantly straightening itself upon any inward stir, and he said to himself, "This is no common man!"
They were moving slowly along the avenue, Donal by the rider's near knee, talking away like men not unlikely soon to know each other better.
"You don't make much use of this avenue!" said Donal.
"No; its use is an old story. The castle was for a time deserted, and the family, then passing through a phase of comparative poverty, lived in the house we are in now--to my mind much the more comfortable."
"What a fine old place it must be, if such trees are a fit approach to it!"
"They were never planted for that; they are older far. Either there was a wood here, and the rest were cut down and these left, or there was once a house much older than the present. The look of the garden, and some of the offices, favour the latter idea."
"I have never seen the house," said Donal.
"You have not then been much about yet?" said Mr. Graeme.
"I have been so occupied with my pupil, and so delighted with all that lay immediately around me, that I have gone nowhere--except, indeed, to see Andrew Comin, the cobbler."
"Ah, you know him! I have heard of him as a remarkable man. There was a clergyman here from Glasgow--I forget his name--so struck with him he seemed actually to take him for a prophet. He said he was a survival of the old mystics. For my part I have no turn for extravagance."
"But," said Donal, in the tone of one merely suggesting a possibility, "a thing that from the outside may seem an extravagance, may look quite different when you get inside it."
"The more reason for keeping out of it! If acquaintance must make you in love with it, the more air between you and it the better!"
"Would not such precaution as that keep you from gaining a true knowledge of many things? Nothing almost can be known from what people say."
"True; but there are things so plainly nonsense!"
"Yes; but there are things that seem to be nonsense, because the man thinks he knows what they are when he does not. Who would know the shape of a chair who took his idea of it from its shadow on the floor? What idea can a man have of religion who knows nothing of it except from what he hears at church?"
Mr. Graeme was not fond of going to church yet went: he was the less displeased with the remark. But he made no reply, and the subject dropped.
