dividual. His love to
Ginevra stood like a growing thicket of aromatic shrubs, until her
confession set the fire of heaven to it, and the flame that consumes
not, but gives life, arose and shot homeward. He had never
imagined, never hoped, never desired she should love him like that.
She had refused his friend, the strong, the noble, the beautiful,
Donal the poet, and it never could but from her own lips have found
way to his belief that she had turned her regard upon wee Sir
Gibbie, a nobody, who to himself was a mere burning heart running
about in tattered garments. His devotion to her had forestalled
every pain with its antidote of perfect love, had negatived every
lack, had precluded every desire, had shut all avenues of entrance
against self. Even if "a little thought unsound" should have
chanced upon an entrance, it would have found no soil to root and
grow in: the soil for the harvest of pain is that brought down from
the peaks of pride by the torrents of desire. Immeasurably the
greater therefore was his delight, when the warmth and odour of the
love that had been from time to him immemorial passing out from him
in virtue of consolation and healing, came back upon him in the
softest and sweetest of flower-waking spring-winds. Then indeed was
his heart a bliss worth God's making. The sum of happiness in the
city, if gathered that night into one wave, could not have reached
half-way to the crest of the mighty billow tossing itself heavenward
as it rushed along the ocean of Gibbie's spirit.

He entered the close of the Auld Hoose. But the excess of his joy
had not yet turned to light, was not yet passing from him in
physical flame: whence then the glow that illumined the court? He
looked up. The windows of Mistress Croale's bedroom were glaring
with light! He opened the door hurriedly and darted up. On the
stair he was met by the smell of burning, which grew stronger as he
ascended. He opened Mistress Croale's door. The chintz curtains of
her bed were flaming to the ceiling. He darted to it. Mistress
Croale was not in it. He jumped upon it, and tore down the curtains
and tester, trampling them under his feet upon the blankets. He had
almost finished, and, at the bottom of the bed, was reaching up and
pulling at the last of the flaming rags, when a groan came to his
ears. He looked down: there, at the foot of the bed, on her back
upon the floor, lay Mistress Croale in her satin gown, with red