hrough your mind in an instant.
It may be so, Providence giving a man, however his balance-sheet
stands, a last chance to square it fair and well.

Everybody being gone home, and I being alone, after our dizzy ball, I
felt that I had to count up the position. It needed no effort to
understand that the Black Colonel's purpose in invading me had been to
meet Marget and her mother, to impress himself upon them, all in the
interest of his designs. He had relied for safety upon the temporary
state of neutrality which the ball carried with it, and he had come, he
had seen, he had--what? So far my thoughts convoyed me. But my little
room in the castle with its cell-like windows, its low ceiling, even, I
would add, its sense of plain refinement, worried me, and I went out
into the night and the spaciousness of earth and heaven. Oh, for
freedom to breathe and think, and oh for it at that witching time when
night and day hold their bridal of mating among the Highland hills.

It was the hour, in our altitudes, at which night sleeps her heaviest,
as if to snatch the last wink from the breaking morn. Nature was
superbly at rest, sloughing the worn trappings of yesterday, preparing
the shining armour of the morrow. It was the hour of creation, the
wonder-coming of a child into the world, magnified beyond imagining, a
tender life, very, very beautiful. It cried to my soul, seeking the
humblest companionship for its own great soul, playing upon mine with a
touch of incomparable delicacy.

And yet, yet, the chief feeling was almost that of a paganism, of an
earth-smell and an earth-worship, of a giant awakening from torpor,
ravenous with hunger. It was all the grand savagery, the terrible
strength of Mother Earth, the Great Protector, from whose loins I had
sprung, but who is unspeakably awesome until you see her face in the
rising sun. Then the nightmare of the darkness which empalls her with
a cold sense of death, turns into a radiance as of gold and kindness.

Ah! it was worth while to be abroad among the heather and the fir-trees
at dawn, for the virgin world, the pagan, freed from cerements and
found in the twilight to be a god, was all my own, mine to enjoy. I
think I know why primitive man, when he lived in lands where Nature was
wild and the nights were long, was a resolute pagan. No light, no
warmth of its torch, had he to set the fire of reverence in him
burning, and reverence is the footstool of belief in God.