nd mournful rush of
the wind, which seemed as if it were trying to utter some universal
grief. At sunset, braving the cold, she would mount the creaking
staircase, pass along the silent upper corridors, and on through the
empty rooms to the garret in the tower. The solitude was a relief; the
strangeness of the scene appealed to some wild instinct, and to the
intense melancholy that lurks in the Celtic nature.

Even at night, she did not shrink from braving the glooms and silences
of the deserted upper floor, nor the solitude of the garret, which
appeared the deeper, from the many memories of happy evenings that it
evoked. She wished Ernest would come home. It was so long since she had
seen her favourite brother. She could not bear the thought of his
drifting away from her. What talks they had had in this old garret!

These nights in the tower, among the winds, soothed the trouble of her
spirit as nothing else had power to do. The mystery of life, the thrill
of existence, touched her with a strange joy that ran perilously near to
pain. What vast dim possibilities lurked out there, in the hollows of
the hills! What inspiration thundered in the voice of the prophet wind!

Once, she had gone downstairs and out, alone, in a tearing storm, to
wander across the bleak pastures, wrapt round by the wind as by a flame;
at one with the desperate elemental thing.

The wanderer felt herself caught into the heart of some vast unknown
power, of which the wind was but a thrall, until she became, for a
moment, consciously part of that which was universal. Her personality
grew dim; she stood, as it seemed, face to face with Nature, divided
from the ultimate truth by only a thin veil, to temper the splendour and
the terror. Then the tension of personal feeling was loosened. She saw
how entirely vain and futile were the things of life that we grieve and
struggle over.

It was not a side, an aspect of existence, but the whole of it that
seemed to storm round her, in the darkness. No wonder, when the wind was
let loose among the mountains, that the old Highland people thought that
their dead were about them. All night long, after Hadria returned to her
room in the keep, the wind kept up its cannonade against the walls,
hooting in the chimneys with derisive voices, and flinging itself, in
mad revolt, against the old-established hills and the stable earth,
which changed its forms only in slow obedience to the persuadings of the
elements, i