o pacing a picture-gallery, where the fiercest storm
that ever blew could send in only little threads of air through the
chinks of windows and doors!

"Yes," his lordship went on, "I taught myself hardship in my boyhood,
and I reap the fruits of it in my prime!--Come up here: I will show you
a prospect unequalled."

He stopped in front of a large picture, and began to talk as if
expatiating on the points of a landscape outspread before him. His
remarks belonged to something magnificent; but whether they were
applicable to the picture Donal could not tell; there was light enough
only to give a faint gleam to its gilded frame.

"Reach beyond reach!" said his lordship; "endless! infinite! How would
not poor Maldon, with his ever fresh ambition after the unattainable,
have gloated on such a scene! In Nature alone you front success! She
does what she means! She alone does what she means!"

"If," said Donal, more for the sake of confirming the earl's impression
that he had a listener, than from any idea that he would listen--"if
you mean the object of Nature is to present us with perfection, I
cannot allow she does what she intends: you rarely see her produce
anything she would herself call perfect. But if her object be to make
us behold perfection with the inner eye, this object she certainly does
gain, and that just by stopping short of--"

He did not finish the sentence. A sudden change was upon him, absorbing
him so that he did not even try to account for it: something seemed to
give way in his head--as if a bubble burst in his brain; and from that
moment whatever the earl said, and whatever arose in his own mind,
seemed to have outward existence as well. He heard and knew the voice
of his host, but seemed also in some inexplicable way, which at the
time occasioned him no surprise, to see the things which had their
origin in the brain of the earl. Whether he went in very deed out with
him into the night, he did not know--he felt as if he had gone, and
thought he had not--but when he woke the next morning in his bed at the
top of the tower, which he had no recollection of climbing, he was as
weary as if he had been walking the night through.

CHAPTER XXXI.

BEWILDERMENT.

His first thought was of a long and delightful journey he had made on
horseback with the earl--through scenes of entrancing interest and
variety,--with the present result of a strange weariness, almost
misery. What had befallen him? Was th